


Any Alpha Would

by decaf_kitty



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alpha Hatake Kakashi, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Beta Umino Iruka, Bottom Umino Iruka, M/M, Omega Verse, Top Hatake Kakashi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-05-31 10:14:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 33,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19423903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decaf_kitty/pseuds/decaf_kitty
Summary: Iruka Umino is a beta like the vast majority of Konoha. It makes him a better teacher, a better shinobi, a better friend.Especially when his perpetually-unhormonal alpha friend Kakashi Hatake suddenly returns from a mission, heavily wounded and in heat.So Iruka offers himself to Kakashi as an omega replacement.(As flailinginlove once wrote: A/B/O dynamics but without mpreg, dub-con, and rivers of gushing fluids, also trying to avoid overly stereotyped gender roles.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This would not get out of my mind. I'm both sorry and not sorry at all.
> 
> Kakashi and Iruka are usually imagined as alpha and omega... What if one of them was a beta? What happens then between hormones, lust, and love?
> 
> ____

Iruka was wide-eyed, staring up at the legendary jōnin, when he whispered, his voice shaking, “It’s okay, Kakashi-sensei. I know I’m not an omega, but I can – you can –”

Blood dripped on his face. He tried not to flinch; he kept his hands tightly clutching Kakashi’s flak jacket.

He had never seen his friend as he was now. Truthfully, Iruka barely remembered Kakashi was an alpha most days. During their entire friendship, the man had been unresponsive to Konoha omegas, never batting an eye at passing pheromones, never glancing at an omega in heat.

But now Iruka was flat on his back on the linoleum floor of his classroom, his gaze stuck on the gruesome head wound in the thick of Kakashi’s silver hair. Only a few inches away from the still-seeping cut, he had nowhere else to look. He certainly wasn’t going to close his eyes with Kakashi forcibly pinning him down on the ground. Their faces were so close Iruka could feel the man’s hot breath pouring through his mask. He could see Kakashi’s dilated pupil – the slight difference between pure black and dark grey – trying to focus down on him but failing over and over again. 

Another fat blood droplet fell from Kakashi’s injury onto Iruka’s scarred cheek. 

The alpha above him was in heat. 

He was so very much in heat, it had Iruka, just a beta, feeling dizzy.

Iruka was trying to remember how they even got here. Kakashi-sensei, his friend, permanently unbothered and even insensitive, had knocked him down onto the classroom floor and forcibly held down Iruka’s shoulders. Just a moment earlier, Iruka had been outside with Suzuki-san, speaking to the woman by the playground, discussing how her son seemed to be presenting as omega like her. He had been reassuring her that, although he himself was a beta, he knew a great deal about alphas and omegas, being both a teacher and friends to all three sexes. Little Mako would have plenty of shinobi to look up to – including the beloved First Hokage himself! – and he would never be bullied at the Academy, not under Iruka’s careful watch.

Without the least bit of warning, Kakashi had silently materialized on the other side of the playground. The unexpected presence of his friend attracted Iruka’s attention immediately. The jōnin’s aura was bad. He was leaning far, far left. His hands were both shoved into his pockets. He was staring straight at Suzuki-san.

Who… Iruka suddenly noticed… was going into heat. She was an omega going into heat.

In front of what Iruka rapidly realized was a heavily wounded alpha jōnin returning to Konoha from a mission.

He stepped in between alpha and omega, ordered Suzuki-san to go home, and…  


Kakashi had abruptly appeared in front of him like a black-shadow specter from a horror movie. His hitai-ate was a little askew; his whole demeanor was darkened, disturbed. An enemy had landed a sword-blow above his left temple, cutting into his scalp and flooding his silver hair with bright-red blood. His high-necked blue mask had slipped down some. Kakashi’s revealed eye was roaming about Iruka’s form as if he was trying to take in all of the man but finding it impossible.

The jōnin seized Iruka’s flak jacket, lifting him right off the ground and into the air.

The next second, they were standing in Iruka’s classroom. Still fearfully soundless, Kakashi had shoved him to the floor and then restrained him before Iruka could even comprehend that he’d been taken upstairs in a shared Body Flicker jutsu.

And now Iruka was holding onto the two front pockets of Kakashi’s flak jacket like they were dual lifelines. The sounds in the classroom seemed deafening: the jōnin’s harsh breathing through his mask merged with the intense pounding of Iruka’s heart in his ears. The alpha above him was exuding all sorts of pheromones that Iruka had never, ever associated with his friend, Kakashi Hatake. Being a beta, he only occasionally witnessed alphas in heat – and he was rarely so close to one without someone else’s instantaneous intervention.

But he knew the complex scent saturating the atmosphere. 

Iruka recognized the hot flush of sunburn-red on Kakashi’s slightly exposed cheek.

He could feel the jōnin’s instability as it shifted him in turn. Although unreasonably silent, Kakashi had no control over his body’s movements: he was trembling from top to bottom and taking Iruka along with him. Along with witnessing uncharacteristic shakiness, there was something else that Iruka had never experienced before with Kakashi.

The very pronounced hardness pressed against Iruka’s thigh.

He felt his mouth going dry at the sensation as he stared up at Kakashi’s blushing but mostly concealed features. Honestly, Iruka hadn’t thought the jōnin ever became aroused: he’d always imagined him as both aromantic and asexual. When Iruka had gone on dates with other betas, Kakashi had never appeared to notice, even the time they accidentally ended up in odd conversational three-way at Ramen Ichiraku. 

But he had been wrong, very wrong. 

Not only did Kakashi Hatake feel arousal, he was sexually fixated on Iruka - at least in this moment. His heat as an alpha was making him thoughtless, reckless, crazed. He was someone else, he was out of his mind and totally primal in his instinct. He couldn’t keep still, he couldn’t even focus fully on Iruka laid out underneath him.

He would go after Suzuki-san - any alpha would – she was an omega in heat, her pheromones screaming for him to find her and fuck her and make her his.

Worst of all, Suzuki-san didn’t have a mate. 

If Kakashi bit her…

So Iruka had shakily reassured him, keeping their bodies intertwined, trying to prevent his friend from losing it on someone else:

“It’s okay, Kakashi-sensei. I know I’m not an omega, but I can – you can –”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your support. You are far too kind.
> 
> I would also like to thank the flight attendants on my 10-hour flight who kept me stocked on ginger ale and gin & tonics while I wrote this chapter. Kudos to you.
> 
> ___

Iruka watched as his words sunk past Kakashi’s rampaging hormones.

The jōnin could not sustain eye contact: he kept looking down at Iruka’s throat, drifting further down to his blue shirt and heavy green flak jacket, then back up again, on a continual loop. The red flush on the square of pale flesh above Kakashi’s mask and beside his hitai-ate was worsening with each subsequent second. His chest was heaving; he looked close to passing out he was so unsettled.

Then the dark grey of Kakashi’s eye disappeared as his pupil fully, entirely dilated.

Only black was there. There wasn’t a bit of color left.

Kakashi’s right hand went from Iruka’s shoulder to his shinobi blue trousers – and then the alpha tore downwards, snapping the button off and destroying the zipper in one movement. Breathing ever more roughly, he grabbed Iruka’s boxers and did the same thing with that garment, violently forcing the cloth to bunch far down below at Iruka’s knees. 

Kakashi was still shaking.

As things began to happen between them, Iruka realized he’d started to shake as well. Anxiety swam up his throat in the form of bile. Even though the weak part of himself wanted to shut his eyes and hide away, he made himself stare at his alpha friend’s face. He had to track the state of Kakashi’s head injury and the fluctuating intensity of his heat. 

The two of them had sparred innumerable times… of course Kakashi always went easy on him. Even when Iruka utilized his most guerilla battle techniques, the jōnin never lost. He’d just use a Substitution Jutsu at the last second and end the bout by touching the back of Iruka’s neck with his index finger.

When Iruka looked back at him in surprise and frustration, Kakashi would smile under his mask, his single eye curving, and say, “Good try, Iruka-sensei.”

Now, with the very same jōnin above him, Iruka was having a difficult time remembering their friendship.

Instead, the primal part of his brain was running a heated mantra:

_He’s so strong, he’s going to fuck you so hard, he’s going to make you feel **good.**_

Certainly Kakashi wasn’t thinking about their sparring sessions as he plied Iruka’s fingers off his flak jacket, one by one, like a villain dislodging his adversary’s precarious grip on a cliffside. The jōnin’s hands were visibly shaking as he dug inside his own jacket pocket. His eye was still doing its strange trick, focusing above Iruka’s fixated gaze then down to his chest, then back up again, over and over, over and over, over and over.

The alpha’s absurdly strong pheromones weren’t just making Iruka dizzy – even though he was only a beta, the powerful chemicals were doing downright terrible things to his sense of propriety – making his hips twist and lift up – making his hands act irrational, grabbing at Kakashi’s jacket again, trying to get him to shift back downwards so they stayed close together.

Or maybe it wasn’t Kakashi’s pheromones. 

Maybe it was the desperation in the alpha’s movements. The atypical shaking, the trembling. The heavy blush. The way Kakashi pushed Iruka’s clothing down even more, or how the jōnin couldn’t restrain himself from suddenly stopping and blatantly staring at Iruka’s rising arousal.

It was so very hard not to want that to be only for him, because of him, him – Iruka Umino.

Him - making one of Konoha’s strongest jōnin weak.

Iruka Umino causing Kakashi Hatake, the Copy Nin, to want.

But those thoughts blew from Iruka’s head as he realized what Kakashi had been going for in his flak jacket pocket: a small vial of multi-purpose lubricant, the kind that high-ranking shinobi carried with them on missions.

Iruka tried not to be alarmed while he watched the incredibly disoriented alpha above him bite the vial through his mask – then break the glass with hidden teeth – and then slather four – four! – of his fingers with the slick stuff – and throw the vial aside without looking, shattering it against the wall.

As Kakashi approached between Iruka’s bare thighs with terrifying speed, Iruka thanked all the gods he’d ever known that his alpha friend wore fingerless gloves. Even though he’d had rushed sex in bar bathrooms and even once in an alleyway, he and his previous beta partners had always worn most of their clothing. Still, no one had ever prepared him while wearing gloves, but at least Kakashi's were fingerless... 

He couldn’t stop looking at Kakashi’s Konoha hitai-ate, the shining metal still in place over the Sharingan. The cloth headband had dipped down a bit, revealing his other silver brow furrowing in confused concentration. 

Likewise, the ever-present blue mask was still concealing Kakashi’s identity, even now.

The alpha was certainly not gentle as his freezing cold fingers, wet with oil, suddenly found Iruka’s backside and pushed inside. 

Yet – yet – Iruka was totally bewildered as he stared up at the jōnin.

He’d never heard of an alpha in heat preparing anyone. They took, they fucked. 

They didn’t wait around for a ready partner. They didn’t take precious time away from their relief.

But Kakashi wasn’t even initially using all four fingers as he opened Iruka up with mystifying but brutal efficiency. Startled by the abrupt change and the clashing sensation of satisfaction and discomfort, Iruka realized he could feel the cloth-leather of Kakashi’s gloves against his sensitive skin… the alpha was abruptly all the way down past both knuckles.

Then suddenly there was a third finger – and Iruka found himself frantically clutching Kakashi’s forearm, the one still holding his shoulder down, as his eyes rolled to the back of his head.

He was gasping out loud, unable to get, keep, catch his breath, as Kakashi introduced his fourth finger only a moment later, and he’d never in his life wondered more about how omegas had ever evolved to handle such insane pain and weird conflicted pleasure. He couldn’t keep himself from shoving his sandals against the linoleum, trying to get traction to move his body both into and away from Kakashi. Even though he had no interest in hurting his friend, Iruka could feel the thick muscles of Kakashi’s arm parting under the pressure of his vicious clawing grip. 

His fingernails broke the alpha’s skin through Kakashi’s shirt sleeve as rocketing pleasure shot through him, sharp and explosive and aiming right for the rational remains of his brain.

Oh – oh, Kakashi had hit – he had found –

All of a sudden, above him, Kakashi went entirely still.

Entirely. 

He was like a pointer dog that had finally found dead prey for its master, spotting a corpse floating in shallow water.

Kakashi’s hand had become motionless as well, and Iruka embarrassed himself almost immediately by shifting his hips downward to regain the feeling from a second earlier. He found he actually wanted more of the impossible sensation of fearfully keen pain and unexpected hedonism of getting finger-fucked so thoroughly.

But then the alpha’s fingers were gone, taken entirely out of him.

Iruka realized he’d squeezed his eyes shut at some point; he opened them to look up at Kakashi.

With only his single half-lidded eye, the jōnin was staring down at him. 

His pupil was still dilated beyond belief, but now –

Now, just like the rest of his body, Kakashi’s eye had found stability.

It was fixed on Iruka’s flushed, lust-fevered face.

For a strange, too-long second, the two of them stared at each other. There was no denying that Kakashi was still very much in heat: his pheromones had only thickened and grown in intensity, filling the classroom, making the room smell less like fresh blood, chalk, and failed jutsus and more like an alpha breaking into primal sweat. Furthermore, the jōnin was even redder in the face. Even the soft spot right under Kakashi’s eye had become pink in the rush of blood. While no longer shaking, Kakashi looked stunningly odd in his new stillness. It appeared as if he’d been struck by an awful jutsu and he was now awaiting the slice of cold metal across the tendons of his throat.

Iruka loosened his maddened hold on the jōnin’s forearm as he worked to catch his breath. 

After a second, though, he couldn’t handle it anymore, and he brokenly said out loud, staring up at his frozen alpha friend:

“Ka-kashi?”

Then, just like that, Iruka was face down on the floor, his bare knees on the cold linoleum, his ass brought up high in the air by Kakashi’s ruthless still-gloved hands. 

He barely had time to register the change before the alpha’s ridiculously large cock slid between his cheeks, up towards his spine, and Iruka shuddered, whole body, completely out of his control. His panting returned full force in anticipatory fear and want. He could tell the size of Kakashi’s arousal – and he’d never taken anything like it before – and he was going to be in so much pain, he was certain about that, but – but –

_He’s so strong, he’s going to fuck you so hard, he’s going to make you feel **good.**_

As Kakashi’s left hand roughly clutched on Iruka’s hip, Iruka found himself reaching back and twisting enough to touch his friend’s fingers digging into his muscle.

“It’s okay, it’s really okay,” he muttered to the other man while closing his eyes, trying badly not to black out from fear or desire – although which one he wasn’t sure.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your daily dose, delivered a tiny bit late.
> 
> ____

Iruka could feel Kakashi pause at the reassurance – and then the alpha hoisted him up higher, further spreading him open. It was impossible for Iruka not to be overwhelmed, to not scrabble his hands on the linoleum seeking out a semblance of security. Of course it would have only been an illusion: Kakashi was the one in control of the situation, even if he was out of his mind on raging hormones. Iruka seemed to barely be in existence; he was only there to experience the wild ride while trying to survive the most incomprehensible encounter of his life.

He had mentally readied himself for the pain of Kakashi pushing in – but –

At first Iruka wasn’t sure about the sound echoing the classroom, but then he realized it was him, it was himself, he was making a high-pitched noise of panic. Even though the jōnin had tried to prepare him, the angle was strange, even if it made him more open. Iruka’s desperately, dumbly clawed at the tractionless floor as Kakashi, ever-so-silent except for his loud, rough, erratic breathing, finally pushed past the tight ring of muscle. His face shoved against the floor, Iruka’s eyes went wide, searching the ground for something, anything, to help explain away the confused agony of the alpha’s unbearably slow movement. 

Wouldn’t it have been better if Kakashi just shoved it in? 

No, no, he would have definitely bled that way. He would have been torn apart.

But this was absolute torture. _Absolute obscene torture._

Flushed, feeling his hair stick to his face from sweat, Iruka couldn’t restrain the anxious whine continually tearing out of his throat. He suddenly choked at the sensation of Kakashi pushing in even further and dropped his head so hard he hit his collarbone with an audible smack. From that point on, he really couldn’t maintain his breathing, no matter how his shinobi brain reminded him, angrily, ferociously, that he was making it worse for himself by hyperventilating.

Kakashi’s gloved hands, so very cold, slid upwards from his hips to – to –

To push him down flat on the linoleum, all of him, his entire body from his face to his toes.

As his chest heaved irregularly against the floor, Iruka tried to understand what was happening. Certainly Kakashi wasn’t entirely inside him - the alpha must have been only halfway at most. Yet the jōnin was already changing positions, he was adjusting, he was abruptly grabbing Iruka’s bare ass with both of his gloved hands clenching hard at the muscle. As a consequence of the shifted stance, Iruka’s arms spread wide, his sleeves fully down on the floor, his fingers shaking up to their tips. His shirt saved him from the cold of the linoleum, but most of his bare thighs pressed against the ground even as he kept his hips up, unable and unwilling to go totally prone. 

Iruka was crazily embarrassed to realize at that moment just how hard he was.

He hadn’t noticed from all the commotion of fear and dry agony but –

His erection brushed against the floor in this new position, and it sent wild shivers through his body, making his eyes flutter not from excruciating hurt but unreasonable new pleasure.

Kakashi was so confusingly slow as he went back and forth into Iruka, only getting half of his enormous cock inside before pulling back out and doing it again, again, again, again.

It took a few seconds before Iruka understood he’d stopped hyperventilating. He’d caught his breath, he wasn’t shaking from pain anymore, he was – he was –

_Oh… oh, this is good, this is really good, this is so fucking good._

A different astonished blush flew over him. He couldn’t believe it all of a sudden. He and Kakashi-sensei were fucking. They were fucking in his classroom. He was getting _fucked_ by his friend.

His whine dissipated and was replaced by loud wavering panting. Iruka felt increasingly delirious, his eyes growing heavy, his mouth becoming ever more open. His cock was getting harder, too, making the occasional touch against the floor all the more delicious. His hands weren’t scratching against the linoleum for safety or solidity - but glorying it the sensation of touching something cold when everything else was so hot, hot, hot –

With profane precision and speed, Kakashi leaned over him and shoved Iruka’s shirt and flak jacket far up his back to reveal his skin and scar. The alpha’s still-gloved hands dropped noisily to Iruka’s sides, his thick clothed biceps shoved tight against Iruka’s waist. Without a second of warning, Kakashi’s masked mouth swept against Iruka’s revealed scar, the whole length of it. The jōnin’s breath was so scorching, the tissue felt inflamed, it felt newly wounded and bloody. Undoubtedly, some of Kakashi’s head injury was getting Iruka’s back wet, but between the sweat coming off the alpha and the sweat Iruka’s body was producing from the exertion of sex, it was impossible to tell anything except that he was wet, wet, wet –

And Kakashi was still fucking him, slow, hard, strong, and ceaseless, as his masked mouth memorized the scar that Mizuki had left not so long ago.

Iruka was so out of it, he heard himself moan, blissful, muddled, “Kakashi, fuck, _yes._ ”

The alpha stopped breathing.

The change was instant: Iruka felt fully mortified as he realized just how loud he was being in the resulting silence. Out of sheer embarrassment, he tried to stop panting open-mouthed, but he practically swallowed his tongue when he did, so he was back doing it only a second later. 

Trying to understand what had happened, Iruka twisted his head to glance back at his friend. The man was so astoundingly hot-skinned - and still fully dressed, like he was only a single hand formation away from skipping out and running away on a month-long mission.

Although not really able to look at him well, or for long, Iruka just barely caught the utterly confused expression on the jōnin’s partially-visible features. Kakashi’s hitai-ate was sloped even further down his face, something that looked both bizarre and uncomfortable. Likewise, his sweat-soaked blue mask had slipped too: it was nearly falling off the tip of his nose. 

Shit, his silver hair was dripping blood everywhere. 

The wound had opened more as they had begun fucking. 

Iruka’s pain faded as his shinobi instincts took over.

He was about force his way into a sitting position, taking the motionless alpha out of him, to begin a hurried healing jutsu when –

Kakashi suddenly looked up from Iruka’s exposed back scar.

Their gazes met.

_Oh fuck._

The alpha’s pheromones – already drenching the room, nearly coalescing into something visible – unpredictably became even more disordered. Although just a beta, Iruka felt it happen all at once. He couldn’t keep his arms steady: they buckled underneath him, sending him crashing to the floor. He managed just in time to protect his jaw from cracking on the ground, but the rest of his body sung, sung, sung, all wanting, all desperate, all violent and stupid and thoughtless.

Then Kakashi’s clothed right arm went around Iruka’s chest, under his shirt, and his left arm seized Iruka’s shoulder – and he pulled both of them up with tremendous, effortless strength.

The position was so unfamiliar to Iruka – he was accustomed to getting fucked from behind on his knees, shoved against walls, or done missionary style - that he found himself staring in complete disbelief and shock at the far side of his classroom. They had been fucking very close to his desk, to its right side, but now, totally raised up on his knees, Iruka could perfectly see the closed door he witnessed every day for years. Yet his vision was badly blurred from – from –

From tears?

He didn’t quite catch on for a second why he was so terribly teary-eyed, but then his brain comprehended the change, and –

Kakashi was still inside him, but now _he was fully inside Iruka._

With his shirt and jacket jerked up some, the sensitive sweaty skin of Iruka’s back was flush against Kakashi’s coarse thick-pocketed flak jacket. Before, as the alpha fucked him, he’d felt Kakashi’s bare thighs a bit, but now, with this new sweet horrifying intimate position, Iruka could feel the sweat-slick curve and muscle of Kakashi’s body, the hard cut of his pelvis. The jōnin’s shirt had also ridden up a bit: it was enough that their skin was much flusher and smoother against each other than it had been only a moment before.

Kakashi’s gloved right hand – the one that had prepared him – was still slippery as he now clutched at the muscles of Iruka’s bare chest. The alpha’s fingertips dug roughly into Iruka’s sternum like he was cruelly excavating skin and bone in pursuit of Iruka’s heavily beating heart.

As he suddenly resumed fucking Iruka, this time quicker, harder, pressing in deeper, ever deeper, Kakashi’s left hand went from Iruka’s shoulder to clutch his jaw, then –

Then two of Kakashi’s fingers pushed into Iruka’s wet, open mouth and slid against Iruka’s waiting tongue - over and over again.

There was nothing in Iruka’s head anymore, nothing but:

 _Fuck, fuck, **fuck.**_

Taking all of Kakashi’s cock didn’t seem so impossible anymore – but keeping consciousness sure as hell seemed a fool’s goal with everything the alpha was doing to him. The jōnin was brutal holding them close, their hips moving endlessly together as Kakashi thrust into him at fast, relentless pace. The alpha’s arm was painfully tight against Iruka’s chest, his sternum, his ribcage, heedlessly bunching up Iruka’s shirt and flak jacket out of the way. Kakashi’s fingers were so deep inside Iruka’s mouth he had no choice but to keep his mouth open, his jaw loose, his tongue –

Oh, fuck it, Iruka had a choice, and he was doing what he wanted.

He was licking Kakashi’s fingers like his life depended on it.

Iruka’s salvia was dribbling down his chin, cascading down his throat, as he wetly stroked Kakashi’s fingers in total, absolute desperation and indulgence. He didn’t care about the taste of the alpha’s cloth-leather gloves rough on his lips or the bark-scratched fingertips running rabid along his tongue. He fucking loved it, he loved being fucked from behind, he loved Kakashi finger-fucking his mouth with the alpha’s, his friend’s unthinking fevered obsession with him.

Suddenly Iruka realized his hands had been useless, clutching at air above his own thighs, and he relocated them to the best location of all – 

His neglected, incredibly hard cock.

The first touch was near perfect anguish, so much so that Iruka heard himself groan, guttural and dark, and he threw his head back at the sensation.

As he did, Iruka realized Kakashi’s masked mouth had been on his clothed shoulder, over the thick part of his flak jacket, the whole time. He startled at the proximity of their scarred cheeks so close together. His gaze stupidly strayed to Kakashi’s hitai-ate: it had slid ever further down the alpha’s face like a drunk dropping in slow motion downwards in the street. 

Then Kakashi tilted his head back to look at Iruka with his exposed other eye – all while still fucking him, Iruka’s ass repeatedly cushioning against the alpha’s thickly muscled thighs.

The jōnin’s eye was still entirely dilated, all black, all shadow.

It was an abyss of desire.

And then Kakashi moved his head even more… 

After nudging aside Iruka’s ponytail… Kakashi’s masked teeth grazed Iruka’s nape.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all are far too generous in your feedback.
> 
> Thank you, everyone, for your kudos, subscriptions, bookmarks, and comments. They inspire so very much. 
> 
> ____

Iruka’s brain immediately went in two directions.

First in a fast-paced, furious internal exclamation: 

_What is he doing, he knows I’m a beta, does he not know he’s fucking **me** , does he think I’m someone else? How could he…? I don’t smell like an omega at all. How out of it is he? … How fucking **dare** he treat me like I’m a damn omega!_

Followed rapidly with:

_Bite me, bite me, **please bite me**_.

The words burned ever brighter as Kakashi cloth-covered teeth continued to nip at Iruka’s neck. He swung into a different sort of delirium, unable to control his dumbed-down bodily response to the alpha’s highly specific attention to his nape. As his brain warred nastily with itself, Iruka’s physical form relished the harder, deeper fucking – and his other hand shoved under his own shirt, chasing after Kakashi’s fingers digging into his sternum. 

He just couldn’t merge all the myriad things happening in such an intense short burst.

There was the still-gushing blood from Kakashi’s head wound, now spreading thick on Iruka’s flak jacket, getting into his own hair, combining with their sweat on Iruka’s bare neck. The smell was worse, so much stronger, in this new position with them kneeling and pressed against each other. It made Iruka’s shinobi instincts go all the more awry as he kept recalling battle, combat, surviving severed arteries, seeing rivers of red waterfalling down his brown skin. 

Then there was Kakashi’s soft masked lips and his sharper teeth on Iruka’s neck, on and off, on and off, like he was thinking, considering, wondering what to do. But he wasn’t thinking, not clearly, not coherently, not at all. Instead, the alpha was moving faster now that Iruka’s hand was covering his gloved one: his breathing had returned to its harsh, hot pace and pattern. The jōnin’s hitai-ate was rigid and hard when it struck the back of Iruka’s head at each and every thrust, a damning reminder that they were shinobi, they should be better than this, and –

But, fucking hell, they were _not_ better than this, not at all.

The breath on Iruka’s neck, the teeth – Kakashi’s fixated worship was driving him crazy – the alpha was still fucking him, fucking his mouth with his fingers – and, through it all, through everything, Iruka couldn’t tell if he was flattered, if he really truly wanted to be bitten, or if he was livid beyond belief, insulted down to his core, hurt to the most delicate, lacy-thin vessels woven through his heart.

Kakashi moved quickly and silently. His hand disappeared from Iruka’s lips, off his tongue. Abruptly he pulled back his arm, and a strange tearing sound slipped into Iruka’s overwhelmed ear. He couldn’t discern what it was, but then –

His friend flung his steel-paneled glove across the room so hard that when it hit the far wall –

The metal embedded in the concrete.

Iruka heard himself gasp once in surprise before he instantly went back to dumb, delirious panting as Kakashi continued to fuck him through the act of ridding himself of his glove. 

Then there was a loud crunch of teeth on bone as Kakashi slapped his hand hard over Iruka’s neck – and –

_Fuck. He bit himself._

There was not a second of pause as it all happened behind him. The new sounds were distracting and confusing, but it was the sudden cessation of Kakashi’s masked but open-mouthed rough breathing that proved most disturbing. Even as his body wept at the joy of being so very fucked by such a strong, immovable alpha, Iruka could feel the last shreds of his sanity trying to recognize something was especially weird and wrong about what was happening between them in the classroom.

He didn’t have much time to think about it, though.

Kakashi’s newly wounded hand swiftly went from Iruka’s neck down to Iruka’s hard cock, covering his motionless hand and slotting their bare fingers together.

Though he was definitely still teary-eyed, and his brain was certainly malfunctioning, Iruka had the wherewithal to look down and assess what Kakashi had done to himself. 

The alpha had left behind two crescents of teeth marks on his startlingly pale hand. Where his friend’s canines were… there were pinpricks of blood oozing out, joining searing sweat, the two life liquids becoming blurry and blended. 

_Fuck, that shouldn’t be hot._

But it was. It really, really was.

The alpha wanted to bite him – but restrained himself? Hurting himself in the process, that’s how much he cared? And now -

Iruka could literally not handle the sweet agony of Kakashi’s hand over his, the two of them jerking him off in perfect parallel to Kakashi’s thrusts into him.

He felt restless on his knees, but he could only go with the motion set by Kakashi. 

_He’s so strong – he’s so strong -_

There was so much sweat and blood and pheromones, and Kakashi was fucking him so very hard, and the insane satisfaction of being intimately touched by his friend, that suddenly Iruka realized he was on the edge of passing out.

Apparently Kakashi registered that somehow through everything – or maybe it was something else entirely – it was absolutely impossible to tell in the chaotic wet mess of a situation occurring in the classroom.

But, whatever it was, Kakashi unexpectedly tightened his grip on Iruka’s hand over his cock, clenched harder with his other hand to force them even closer together, and then the alpha angled just so – and –

Oh God, that’s it, _that’s it!_

Iruka did black out, then.

He only knew that it had happened because a few seconds later he scrambled to his hands and knees, easily smelling ejaculate in the wild whirlwind of scents. His body was still crying from pleasure, his nerves lighting up like fireworks and spinning all complex thought from his brain. 

Iruka ended up gasping for a good deal longer, unable to piece it all together again, what had just happened, and where was - ?

Turning his head sharply around, still on all fours, he saw Kakashi Hatake.

His friend was sitting against the far wall under the row of windows.

Between them on the linoleum floor was an absurd amount of cum… 

Kakashi’s cum.

_He didn’t – wait, he didn’t?_

In addition to the flush of sex, Iruka blushed up to his eartips at the realization that no, there really wasn’t anything in him, nothing but the lasting memory of getting passionately fucked.

His legs were still tangled up his trousers as Iruka awkwardly pulled them up. He tried to stand or crawl, he couldn’t tell. Filled with the worst desperation, he only wanted to get closer to Kakashi to better see the state of his friend.

Certainly, even from several feet away, there was no hiding that Kakashi was suffering from extreme blood loss. His head injury really had worsened through their fucking: scarlet painted half his silver hair a different hue, and much of his green flak jacket had changed colors, too. 

Unbelievably, the alpha’s hitai-ate was still in place… 

But his mask was down to his throat. 

Bright red blood curled down his unscarred cheek in countless long lines, catching the curve of his chin.

Kakashi’s lips were parted, not very much, but some, as he struggled to breathe. His eye was loosely closed, his hands limp at his clothed sides. His grey lashes were distinct against his pink-flushed skin, looking almost dark in comparison. 

As Iruka made it to the hormone-dazed alpha, he found he was already going through the hand formations for a healing jutsu. Although he wasn’t a medical-nin by any means, he’d long ago learned how terrifying pre-genin could be in terms of injuring themselves and others. This was not remotely the first horrific head injury that he’d healed – it honestly might have been the tenth time in this classroom alone. 

The green chakra undulated over Iruka’s hands like water.

He had nearly brought his fingers over the gruesome injury when –

Kakashi’s eye snapped open.

It had grey in it again.

The alpha stared at Iruka for a beat – then his gaze dropped to the semen on the floor – then further lowered to his unzipped pants.

A second passed. 

Then Kakashi’s eye widened considerably.

He glanced back up at Iruka with muted alarm screaming across his unmasked expression.

And his jutsu was so astonishingly fast that Iruka barely had time to recognize it.

The leaves left behind in the air were pretty damning as to what had happened, though.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To answer a question posed on Chapter 4:
> 
> Yes, I am writing this every day. It's about two hours a chapter.
> 
> I am so very pleased by your support and comments, it's easy to write.
> 
> ____

Iruka was too exhausted to scream in frustration.

Instead, he went numb, totally numb. Automatic teacher thinking went into effect. For the next hour, he mechanically completed a series of necessary tasks: healed himself (a few tears, but seemingly nothing internal), cleaned himself up and the floor (cum, sweat, and blood – great, just great), opened all the windows and used a wind jutsu to force out the lingering alpha pheromones, and spent a remarkable amount of time grappling with Kakashi’s glove in the wall before he got it free.

After pocketing Kakashi’s glove, Iruka closed the door to his classroom and headed out into the schoolyard. Without much energy, he sought out any blood left behind in the grass. 

A few water jutsus later and another wind jutsu to cleanse the area, the Academy was nearly back in order.

There was now, of course, a disheveled chūnin-sensei standing in front of it, drained in all sorts of ways and also very unimpressed by the glowing rays of fading sunlight.

Iruka sighed to himself. 

He shook his head. 

And then he started to walk to the places that he knew Kakashi frequently hid.

The first was a nice, sturdy tree outside the marketplace where Iruka often found the jōnin lounging and reading his book. Even with shock dulling his senses, Iruka could still imagine Kakashi Hatake glancing down with his one eye to see him – and then waving that familiar damn orange book in greeting. Yeah, he would start his search there. It wasn’t Kakashi’s favorite spot, but it was closest, and –

“I-Iruka-sensei?!”

Totally blank-faced, Iruka looked up, realizing he’d been staring at the ground as he walked further into town. In front of him was one of the other Academy teachers, new to the profession, a beta like him. Currently she was comically wide-eyed and blushing so intensely that she seemed to have just eaten hot curry. 

Before Iruka could respond, Kobayashi-san averted her gaze and stammered out, “I-I didn’t know you had a – that you –”

She was practically falling over herself, and Iruka couldn’t understand why. He had made sure to smooth back his ponytail and recover his normal look. He’d put his bloody jacket and shirt in a scroll to deal with later; he was wearing back-up clothes that he kept in his desk. He’d been faultless in cleaning any physical sign of his recent…

Suddenly it fell into place.

_Oh._

_I smell like an alpha fucked the life out of me._

Even though he’d thought he didn’t have it left in him, Iruka found himself blushing. He hurried past Kobayashi-san with little more than a half-hearted wave - and then jumped to the rooftops to avoid any other awkward encounters. Never in his two plus decades of existence had he moved so fast, and he’d been a hellion as a kid, rashly running away from ANBU on multiple occasions. 

But now Iruka was having to restrain himself from covering his face in embarrassment as he ran the fuck home at full speed.

There was something keen and painful about being found out as getting fucked by an alpha. He really couldn’t put a finger what was worst: that an alpha had inexplicably chosen him over an omega or that an alpha had used him for relief. The mystery itself was a fucking horror show. Sure, he and Kakashi were friends, maybe even good friends, especially since Naruto became a genin. They regularly sparred; they ate ramen together. Sitting on a bench and talking with Kakashi up in a tree had turned into a routine occurrence, one that Iruka looked forward to with simmering fondness. Of course he had other friends: many were teachers at the Academy, but he’d also befriended chūnin and jōnin who went out on far-away missions. 

But… but Kakashi was different. Iruka had just never wanted to admit it.

He managed to get home, pull down his wards, and slip inside his apartment without another uncomfortable interaction.

As he undressed and contemplated burning his alpha-pheromone-soaked clothes, his brain began to come back online. There were so many more coherent thoughts now, ones wondering just how he’d convinced the Copy Nin to stay with him, and not…

… and not pursue Suzuki-san and take her instead.

An astonishing truth shone above the others: Kakashi had really wanted to fuck someone. Even as badly wounded as he was, the alpha had been incredibly intent in his desire. Yet he had obviously made it far into Konoha without stopping and stealing an omega for his uses. 

As Iruka turned on his shower, watching the air fill with steam, he kept coming back to the same peculiar issue. Even though he was a beta, he almost always noticed when omegas were first falling into a heat. A number of his childhood friends had turned out to be omegas; he’d been there when they initially presented with their brilliant, bold hormones. Undeniably Iruka was the first line of defense for many young omega shinobi in Konoha: he had protected several from their alpha peers and instructed them about recognizing the symptoms of an upcoming heat. 

Yet he hadn’t noticed a thing about Suzuki-san – not until Kakashi appeared at the Academy. 

… so, then, had his friend triggered her heat? Were his pheromones so strong that they could do that?

Caught by surprise by the sudden realization, Iruka sputtered as he stupidly upturned his scarred face into the shower spray. He slapped away the water, his brain rapidly running through a hundred different details that now made more sense. 

Suzuki-san’s shifting expression, the sudden rise of a blush on her cheeks…

That had happened _after_ Kakashi materialized. 

And… and… 

Even though he vehemently opposed to the admission, Iruka couldn’t deny that he’d acted like an omega when he and Kakashi were together. Certainly his beta instincts were still there, but so much of him had become strange. His changed behavior might have been due to the fact he – well, he –

Ignoring the pheromone-removal shampoo thick in his hand, Iruka turned his stare down to his cock, which was stirring in delight at recent memories. He swallowed and winced at the same time as the truth of things finally decided to strike him all at once. 

Alone with only his most private thoughts, there was no more avoiding it, the sly awful song written across his heart, the wild vivid visuals in his best-worst dreams.

He had wanted Kakashi for a long time. 

It was an utter betrayal of their friendship, and it made him frightfully ashamed of himself. Nevertheless, Iruka never stopped himself, he had never put a pause on his feelings. Instead, he let his little beta heart flutter wildly when he saw Kakashi’s single eye spot him in the crowd and curve slightly in pleased salutation. When the alpha stopped at the mission desk, leisurely discussing low-ranked missions with Naruto and his team, Iruka always found himself leaning forward, his skin warming, his hope ever blooming. The times that they sparred – Iruka was constantly trying to impress, desiring down to his bones to prove himself as something worthy, someone with promise, a man who merited a second glance, praise, long embraces…

Sometimes in the dark of night, alone in his apartment, Iruka slid his hand under the bedsheets, closed his eyes, and thought of his lazy, beautiful, eccentric friend. 

How their bodies would move together…

How they would kiss.

_I didn’t want him to be with Suzuki. I was being selfish. I wanted him to look at me._

Guilt tore into Iruka, making him all the more bloody and raw, weak and wounded. His shoulders slumped. His eyes crinkled in disappointment with himself. Feeling as if he needed the support, he leaned horribly against the shower wall, wrapping his arms around himself.

_Only me._

But he was a beta, and Kakashi would never look at him that way. The man seemed so asexual, so aromatic, the whole infatuation had always felt pointless anyway. 

Some days, Iruka could tell himself that his one-sided love was a sweet thing like a fanciful daydream, something that meant little in the larger scheme of shinobi life. 

And yet…

Other days, Iruka found himself pained that there would never be anything between them.

Unwanted, unwarranted, the sight of Kakashi catching him by surprise during a spar, touching the back of his neck with one finger, and smiling underneath his mask floated to the forefront of Iruka’s mind.

What they had before… it was innocent, it was simple.

How had things gone so wrong? Had Iruka done the right thing by preventing Kakashi from going after Suzuki? Had his selfish intervention ruined their friendship for the rest of time?

Had his dirty thoughts about his friend done them both in?

Wait, wait – he’d been thinking something else a moment earlier, before all this agony about his unrequited love. It had been about Kakashi’s alpha pheromones, that they were unusually strong. They were definitely the most potent that Iruka had ever witnessed or heard about… Kakashi was able to make omegas go into heat, he could turn betas back to their evolutionarily weakest. Yes, admittedly, Iruka had wanted his friend, he’d wanted them to fuck, but – but – 

But, damn, he’d never acted like that during sex before.

Though, of course, he’d never slept with an alpha until Kakashi.

Still… still… 

The next bit was a blur. With very little clear thought, Iruka rid himself of the pheromones still running rampant over his skin, including inside him: he cleansed everything from his toes to the frayed tips of his hair. In very rapid order, he dressed in his regular shinobi gear, taking kunai and soldier pills with him. Then he was out the door, heading towards the Forest of Death.

Several months ago, he had realized where Kakashi hid away at his most extreme temperatures, hot or cold, full of fury or dead to the world.

Even though he was a chūnin, and darkness swept the woods, Iruka would not surrender to fear of the unknown. Instead, he found himself increasingly infuriated by realization after realization occurred to him about what had just happened. There were several dozen questions that he had for his alpha friend – but the most pressing one kept flying about Iruka’s skull like a wild bird caught indoors, its wings flapping crazily, its heart beating desperately, so very eager to find freedom.

_Were you already in heat before you came to the Academy?_

_Why did you come there? Why did you grab **me**?_

The moonlight was still and soft on Iruka’s form as he strode forward into the Forest of Death.

A final, frightening question crept about his mind, touching the dark spots of his wildest hopes and dreams:

_Do you want me?_

Just ahead of him, Kakashi Hatake shimmered into existence out of the darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few answers...

Kakashi’s silver hair had returned to normal. His shinobi clothes were free of blood. It was as if he’d never had the terrifying injury in the first place. Completely at ease in the Forest of Death, the jōnin slipped both of his hands in his pants pockets and affected his usual slouch.

In the modest moonlight of the woods, the Copy Nin looked perfectly composed. As always, his hitai-ate covered his Sharingan - not how it had been during sex, but its correct elevated position. Similarly, his blue mask was back up to the bridge of his nose. The cloth slid across both cheeks, leaving only the usual square of pale skin on the right side. From this distance, Iruka couldn’t tell the state of the alpha’s pupil, but it looked normal as well.

Iruka might have thought himself going mad, hallucinating a truly lewd masturbatory fantasy - if his body didn’t still pleasantly hurt from their recent time together.

When Iruka didn’t say or do anything after his arrival, Kakashi lifted his head to stare directly at him. Then he spoke for the first time since his baffling appearance in the school yard.

“Are you here to kill me, Iruka-sensei?”

It was so unbelievably not what Iruka had been thinking that he found himself instantly gawking, his jaw dropping, his expression exploding with intense incredulity. 

Of all the million options, why had his friend chosen that terrible welcome?! 

Instinctively checking to see if he had been exuding killing intent – no, of course not, he’d never felt that way with Kakashi! – Iruka shook his head wildly back and forth.

“No!” he blurted out, then he softened a bit, trying to explain why he would hunt down a wounded alpha jōnin in heat. “No. I wanted to see if – if you were okay.”

Kakashi did not appear very persuaded, although admittedly, he was back to being unreadable as he always was around the village. In this case, as many others, Iruka recognized that the lazy manner which his friend was holding himself – well, it was just a disguise, like a Substitution Jutsu or a Clone Technique. Even though Kakashi was criminally laid-back with a considerable number of things, he only pretended to be with others. 

No need to show one’s real feelings, after all. Not if they could be used against you.

Iruka was terrible at that: he was expressive, he had a big bleeding heart, he couldn’t contain his temper.

Such as now! He found himself rushing red with rage as he snapped out, his countenance turning stormy, “You were bleeding everywhere! You could have died. I _know_ you know that.” Iruka was still spitting mad when he asked, grinding out the words, like he was wringing out answers from a rebellious student: “Did you heal yourself, or did you go to the hospital?”

Nearly twenty feet away from him, mostly cloaked in darkness, Kakashi didn’t seem like he wanted to answer. He remained perfectly still and serene, not moving a muscle, as he stared at Iruka deep in the Forest of Death. But Iruka was steadfast in his fury, looking expectantly at his seemingly lucid friend.

It was apparently too much for Kakashi to handle, because he glanced away to the right, showing all of his hitai-ate and the pristine cover of his mask. The moonlight caught the corner of the metal, glinting like a diamond under artificial light. 

The jōnin’s answer sounded leisurely, but the sinister undertone was unmistakable.

“I made someone else do it.”

There was no easy response to Kakashi’s insinuation. Undoubtedly, the alpha had still been rolling in the thick of his heat when he’d found… someone… to complete a healing jutsu, one advanced enough that there was no longer the injury line of the sword-cut on his scalp. He must have continued onwards to his house to find such well-suited clothing, including a new mask to cover his features as he usually did.

But now that Iruka was really paying attention to his friend, he was realizing that the hitai-ate was the same one from before. Like most shinobi, Kakashi evidently didn’t have a spare one. In this particular situation, he hadn’t stopped to clean the blood from the cloth of the headband. The darker spots visible from even this distance… that was his dried blood.

The Forest of Death had its own unique collection of scents, much of which were decay and decomposition, both old and new. Fungus lurched across many of the old trees nearby, spreading spores into the air and filling Iruka’s nose with must. They were standing close to a stagnant pool of water created by recent rain: it must have claimed at least one victim as Iruka smelled familiar traces of deteriorating animal flesh.

Yet… none of that should have been so overwhelming that he didn’t smell Kakashi.

The alpha’s pheromones had been grating and nearly impossible to get out of the classroom. Iruka’s clothes reeked of them. His beta skin had absorbed so much from the other man that he’d had to shower twice with the strongest scent-removal shampoo in his arsenal. 

No… no, Kakashi simply didn’t smell like an alpha now.

It was just like always… like before.

“Is your heat finished?” Iruka wondered aloud, his voice soft. After a moment’s delay, he was surprised by how lost and confused he sounded. It was as if he was a pre-genin struggling to understand a newly introduced jutsu as he gazed curiously at his friend.

Kakashi slowly turned his head to consider Iruka. His gaze was dark and contemplative while he assessed Iruka’s inquisitive features in the faint moonlight.

Then he replied, sounding so very calm and casual:

“No.”

It felt like a dagger had been plunged into Iruka’s heart – surprise struck him so badly. The world around him didn’t smell like an alpha, not even a weak one, not even a child first presenting. Instead, the woods outside Konoha smelled just like it always did in its dark, fearful strangeness. There was not even the most distant whiff of alpha pheromones… nothing remotely like what had flooded his classroom, saturated his skin, made him sparkle and come alive and go mad with lust.

Swallowing tension, concern dominating his expression, Iruka could only ask a follow-up question. He was unable to look away from his friend; they were back to staring at each other.

“What are you doing to your pheromones…?”

Instantly, Kakashi responded in a flat tone, “Chakra control.”

… That made sense. There were rumors of powerful shinobi containing their pheromones. Heats came at unfortunate times: they could botch a mission, they could influence a battle, they could cause the death of teammates and civilians. 

At the Academy, along with jutsus and personal growth, Iruka taught his students how to recognize symptoms of upcoming heats, so they knew when to leave public spaces. They weren’t animals, after all. Being shinobi, they were more skilled than civilians. Thus, even his youngest students were capable of acknowledging biological weakness and striving to avoid its deadly consequences on one’s self and others.

However, Kakashi had gone even further: he was suggesting that his chakra control over his hormones was ironclad. His alpha pheromones had been so strong as to trigger an omega’s heat. They had influenced Iruka to act peculiarly for a beta, make him submissive and wanton. 

If they were always like that, then… 

That would be a real problem.

No wonder Kakashi had developed a strong ability to chakra control his pheromones. Such a powerful chemical influence would be hell in battle if he slid unexpectedly into heat – he could wreck a teammate’s tactics – he could hurt a medical-nin’s chance of saving another shinobi – 

Something suddenly occurred to Iruka. Not everything, but a part of it.

“The head injury. You couldn’t stay in control.”

Keeping perfectly still, Kakashi seemed entirely unaffected by the allegation. The jōnin continued to gaze at Iruka as if indifference and tranquility had combined into a man. He didn’t immediately respond, and Iruka found himself turning quickly over into a dark glower. Crossing his arms over his flak jacket, Iruka squared his shoulders and gave his friend an inflexible glare.

The effect wasn’t instantaneous. Instead, Kakashi stared back at him, seemingly unperturbed. He looked cold and distant like he was standing on the far reaches of a snow-covered mountaintop. His synthetically cavalier attitude seemed all too real suddenly. 

It was like Iruka… like Iruka had never known him at all.

Fear crept like thorny vines across his skin. He… he had definitely known Kakashi... hadn’t he? This… this was still his Kakashi, wasn’t it? This was still the Kakashi Hatake from their ramen dates, their sparring sessions, their meetings at the market, their conversations at the mission desk.

… Wasn’t he? 

“I raped you.”

The three words flew like sharp kunai through Iruka’s eyes, slicing through brain tissue, lodging loudly in the back of his skull. His stomach clenched so hard, bile tore up his esophagus and washed across his tongue in a repulsive wave a second later. He felt staggered by the statement, so staggered that he stepped to the side, instinctively utilizing years of shinobi practice to stabilize his stance and keep on the defense under such a verbal assault. 

“No…” Iruka murmured in return, sick of the vomit thick in his mouth. He swallowed it down, wincing as he did so, and then looked up cuttingly at Kakashi, who remained eternally unmoving and unchanged. “No, you did not.” Iruka grew louder as he said even more firmly, ever more forcefully, “Don’t you _dare_ say that.”

Now Kakashi was quick in his reply, oh so brutally efficient and succinct.

“Yes, I did.”

Disbelief and anger whipped together in a hurricane of dangerous emotions deep inside Iruka. He’d felt both a hundred thousand times before, but never like this, never like this. Out of control, he lividly pointed at Kakashi in the midst of the Forest of Death, and indignation darkened his voice as he declared furiously, “You did _not_. I could have fought you. I could have resisted you.” 

Kakashi disappeared into the darkness.

… and then Iruka was slammed against the thick base of a nearby massive oak. The breath was knocked out of him; his lungs seized for want of oxygen. Tears slid out of the corners of his eyes. His skin sung all strange and electric like he’d mishandled a lightning jutsu. 

Instinctively, he struggled terribly before he realized what was happening.

His alpha friend _was_ still in heat.

Their faces were only inches apart once again. His hitai-ate and mask both still in place, Kakashi should have looked familiar, but instead he looked darker, dangerous. Every single last one of Iruka’s honed shinobi instincts were screaming for him to do everything he could to get away from the other man. This was worse than killing intent. This was using murderous want as its foundation, then adding so many more layers of cold efficiency and sexual obsession and –

The terrifying promise of pleasure and death.

His hormonal instincts damned him within moments.

Iruka’s hands went right back to where they had been hours earlier: clutching the front pockets of Kakashi’s flak jacket like the fabric was the only thing keeping him alive and in existence. 

His eyes became half-lidded. His lips parted. His pants were suddenly far too fucking tight.

But Kakashi was impeccable in his restraint - even after loosening his chakra control over his alpha pheromones, the ones that nearly instantly inspired wild want within Iruka. 

The jōnin’s single revealed eye was narrowed, but there was still a sliver of grey. His pupil was slightly dilated, but it was nothing like before in the classroom. 

In contrast, Iruka whimpered. His hands shook as he held onto the other man. Heavy delicious heat flooded his face, pooled in his groin. _He was desperate - he needed so, so much._

With their faces only inches apart, Kakashi was sharp, cutting, cruel, as he told Iruka, his masked mouth barely moving:

“No, sensei. You never could have stopped me from taking what I wanted.”

And yet… he clearly did not expect Iruka’s hoarse whisper against the healed skin in the thick of his silver hair.

The words came out strangled, but they were spoken with delirious sincerity.

_“I've always loved you.”_


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day Seven, Chapter Seven: 
> 
> Confessing secrets in the soft moonlight.
> 
> ____

Kakashi froze as Iruka shuddered against him.

The difference between jōnin and chūnin, alpha and beta, could not have been more distinct. Wracked by the other man’s pheromones, Iruka clung to his friend, unable to control himself. He fearfully relished Kakashi’s strength in his stock-still state: he pushed his face against Kakashi’s neck, burying his nose in the dark blue fabric and repeatedly rubbing his forehead against the cloth-covered skin. The alpha’s scent was thick there – pure masculine glory – 

_Iruka wanted to drown in it._

_Submerge his face in it, drink mouthfuls of it, let it fill his lungs up to the brim._

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Kakashi finally replied, sounding oddly unsteady. The jōnin continued to hold Iruka against the tree, disregarding how much Iruka was shaking uncontrollably between the bark and his own body. 

Even though the man was in heat, and his pheromones were doing foolishly exhilarating things to Iruka, Kakashi seemed wholly unbothered. In contrast, for Iruka, it was terribly difficult to focus on anything at all. His hormone-fueled brain had him violently clutching onto Kakashi as if he was terrified the jōnin would run away.

Well, he was… He was truly afraid Kakashi would abscond again. 

Plus, Kakashi’s clothed throat was beautiful, and Iruka felt himself melting the more time he spent pressed against the alpha’s delectably warm body. Just like before, he lost control over his breathing: his breath was rough and heavy as he trembled against Kakashi’s perfect, hard form. 

He suddenly understood why omegas loved alphas more than anything, why they rushed into the open arms of enemies like joy-blinded fools, why they betrayed villages when they discovered their destined mate was a missing nin.

He would have killed someone to be with Kakashi for a few more minutes. 

“Iruka,” Kakashi said, his voice suddenly harder. His hands were gripping Iruka’s shoulders; he was trying to get Iruka away from his neck to make their gazes meet. But Iruka was fiercely loyal to the space that he’d begun to revere, and he shook his head back and forth, childishly upset he was being told to leave his new favorite thing behind. 

Eventually, Kakashi forfeited the fight. Instead, he leaned his head against Iruka’s disheveled ponytail by his right ear, their hitai-ates touching intimately:

“It’s my fault you’re like this…” Kakashi murmured absently before his voice became louder, rougher, darker. Then he was revealing something raw and ugly inside him, even though Iruka could only close his eyes and wash away in the wonder of his unbelievable alpha friend. 

“One of our ANBU abandoned the village: they sent me after her because she was a beta, and my specialty is –” 

An undeniable thrill surged through Iruka far, far above his hormonal lust.

Kakashi was trusting him. He was speaking the truth. _He was confessing._

“… I’ve weaponized my pheromones. I combine them with genjutsu and the Sharingan to arouse betas and omegas. It’s how I most often kill for Konoha.”

The jōnin paused as if he thought Iruka might – could – reply, but there was just too much happening, and Iruka simply shoved himself further into the other man, wrapping his arms around the back of Kakashi’s flak jacket and clenching the man’s collar in both hands. 

So Kakashi continued after a moment, forcing his voice to drop down. He all but whispered into Iruka’s ear, the two of them so close together as to be entangled, seemingly merging into one.

“She used a mirroring technique: it reflected my jutsu onto me. I went into heat. I killed her.”

Iruka couldn’t tell if Kakashi was keeping his pheromones out of control on purpose to distract him – maybe both of them? – from his dangerously honest admission. There was no way in hell Kakashi was supposed to be telling him what amounted to Konoha’s secrets – the secrets of its ANBU and the Hokage – a secret that was never intended to make it into enemy Bingo Books.

It was just so damn hard to concentrate on things, but Iruka could _feel_ Kakashi’s breath become hotter as the jōnin’s masked lips touched the curve of Iruka’s ear, his breath fluttering stray hairs loose from Iruka’s ponytail.

“This is how I kill people, Iruka. I’m the Copy Nin – and I make shinobi go mad.”

His mouth lowered ever so slightly to caress the soft line of Iruka’s earlobe. 

“It’s what I did to you.”

Desperate to contradict his friend, Iruka pushed through his lust as best he could, a very pitiful attempt on his part, but he did manage to break through just enough. 

Struggling to keep his eyes open, he desperately panted into Kakashi’s pristine silver hair, “You weren’t – you didn’t – you didn’t –” 

Unable to restrain himself, Iruka found his hips pushing into Kakashi’s, forcing their overly clothed arousals together. The dark throaty groan that tore out of him was so terribly primal, he should have felt embarrassed and shocked, but instead –

Instead Iruka used the momentum as urgently and inventively as he could.

He gasped into the sharp cut of Kakashi’s masked jawline:

“You didn’t use your Sharingan on me.”

And it was absolutely true: at no point during their sexual encounter had Kakashi Hatake removed his hitai-ate… and he wasn’t using the Sharingan now, either.

Moreover, he hadn’t performed any jutsus, at least not in front of Iruka. Unless it had been crazily subtle, he hadn’t cast a genjutsu on Iruka with the two of them together. Truthfully, Kakashi just hadn’t appeared capable of that during the disorienting chaos of his heat.

This… now… what was happening between them… it was Kakashi’s powerful alpha pheromones, his unpredictable heat, and…

Iruka’s already-existing desire rising to the surface in response.

Strangely, Kakashi didn’t freeze up this time. 

Instead, he immediately jostled Iruka backward against the tree, his hands all too firm and rough on Iruka’s shoulders. His single eye still held a thin circle of grey; his black pupil was somewhat dilated but not totally. He seemed to be considering Iruka’s blush-heavy face, the way his lips were parted, the dizzily lusty look in his dark brown eyes.

There should be a hundred serious things traversing Iruka’s mind, but really…

Really it was only:

_Kiss me, please kiss me._

And, of course, Kakashi did no such thing. 

Much truer to his nature, he let Iruka go – and then leapt upward onto a tree branch a hundred feet above the forest floor.

It was a bit humiliating how quickly Iruka fell onto his hands and knees as he tried to even out his irregular breathing and calm the insane beating of his heart. Trained shinobi instincts certainly helped: he soon felt his physical reaction to Kakashi’s extraordinarily potent heat fading away as the alpha kept deliberate distance between them. Although he wanted to rush after his friend, Iruka took a solid moment to strategize and stop his brain from somersaulting about itself.

So Kakashi really did feel sexual desire! But… but it was a scary, terrifying thing. Not joyous, not meant for a one-time partner or a life-long mate. 

He used his pheromones to dispense death.

His most recent mission – loosen his chakra control over his hormones – open his Sharingan – spin out a genjutsu - turn a missing nin beta into a weeping, wanting mess – _and then kill her!_ \- how many times had Kakashi done that?

… how could Kakashi think his pheromones were anything but dangerous?

Something… horrible? 

No wonder he kept himself so restrained. No wonder he never dated. No wonder he never looked at omegas in heat. 

Arousal was violence. 

Desire was manipulation. 

Lust was death.

Ugh, that all just sounded so fucking miserable. And his friend had really thought that he’d raped Iruka?! The realization struck him again as Kakashi’s chemicals dissolved out of his system. It seemed so cruel to think of what happened between them as forced. Admittedly, Iruka had not been expecting such an encounter at the end of a long workday, nor had he decided much or any of their movements, but -

But – 

He wanted Kakashi. He’d always wanted Kakashi to fuck him.

Honestly, Iruka wanted to fuck Kakashi, too.

And that was just his dumb hormones talking. Not something false stirred up by the Sharingan, or genjutsu, or the influence of Kakashi’s bewilderingly strong alpha heat.

Apparently his friend had restrained his pheromones again, because as Iruka jumped up after the jōnin, he couldn’t sense the presence of an alpha, even though he landed right beside one.

Although Kakashi could have sat with his exposed eye out towards the woods, instead he put himself close to the thick of the tree. As Iruka crouched next to him, the only thing he could really see of his friend’s face was the dark cloth of his ever-present mask and the shiny panel of his hitai-ate. Trying to stay calm, Iruka felt a little sick as he ran his gaze over the dried blood splatter still visible on Kakashi’s headband.

What a fucked-up day for his friend.

“Kakashi-sensei,” Iruka found himself saying in attempt to be comforting. “You did what any alpha would do – you went and found relief. I’m not offended by it.” He wanted to bite his tongue, swallow down gallons of his own bitter blood, but he forced himself forward, determined to be reassuring and get them back on even ground with each other. He tried to bring some levity in the tense atmosphere by saying lightly, “I’m just glad you didn’t go after Suzuki-san. I mean, of course, she was the better choice between the two of us, because she’s a –” 

The back of his skull _hurt_.

So did his spine.

So did his wrists – which –

Which were pinned violently above his head.

Because he was flat on his back, precariously laying on the tree branch a hundred feet up, underneath an absolutely distressed Kakashi Hatake, whose lips were twisted under his mask and whose hitai-ate glinted on its metal edges in the moonlight while slung down over his Sharingan.

“You don’t understand,” his friend ground out, desperate, furious, wounded. 

_“I only wanted you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day Eight Preview.
> 
> S E X - I N - A - T R E E .


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear. 
> 
> Adorable Kakashi got in the way of my plans.
> 
> ____

Iruka couldn’t help but blink a few times in surprise.

The visible bit of Kakashi’s expression was so pained, it made Iruka immediately think the jōnin had caught kunai somewhere soft. But, no, the truth of things was that Kakashi Hatake was _emotionally_ distraught, he wasn’t physically hurting. Worse, he seemed very incapable of dealing with it as he further pressed Iruka against the tree branch. While the alpha maintained his control over his heat-disturbed pheromones, he was now trembling all over ever so slightly.

From… from fear? anger? hope? all three?

They were emotions Iruka never imagined on his friend’s mostly hidden face. It was astonishing in so many ways to see Kakashi’s desperation: he seemed to be silently pleading with Iruka to understand a whole range of things deep inside him without him saying anything.

As he stared up at his unstable friend, Iruka found himself particularly looking at the jōnin’s perpetually-worn mask. He could visualize Kakashi’s cloth-covered features now - he couldn’t before, even though he’d shamefully tried to do so a few times. 

Now he knew there were sweet lips there, and sharp biting teeth, and a little black beauty mark.

As he drew his gaze back up to Kakashi’s dilated eye, Iruka offered up a simple suggestion:

“I think you should kiss me.”

He was not prepared for Kakashi’s reaction, but he liked it, he liked it very much. In less than a second, the jōnin went from immensely conflicted to innocently stunned. The slight flush on his visible cheek darkened even further. His half-lidded right eye widened quite a bit. Where the muscles in his jaw had been tight and tense, they went suddenly slack like he was holding back a confused exclamation of ‘…what?’ 

As he worked to process Iruka’s proposal, Kakashi’s grip on Iruka’s wrists lightened. He backed off slightly and began to consider Iruka’s entire shinobi-attired body. It was a much more concerted effort than their first encounter when he couldn’t focus properly, when his gaze kept moving down then up, over and over again. 

Now Kakashi seemed much more in control of himself - even though he was still in his heat. 

It was ridiculously impressive, really. The man must have perfected restraint ever since he first presented, whenever that was. Although Iruka’s beta identity had manifested easily, he’d been witness to many troubled civilians and shinobi, both omega and alpha, over the years.

After what had happened between them in his classroom, he’d thought Kakashi had secretly been the same as all the others – but –

His jōnin friend pulled back his right hand; his long gloved fingers caught the edge of his mask. 

Delicately pulling down on the cloth, Kakashi was focused on Iruka as he revealed the rest of his face. His hitai-ate remained in place, as always screening his Sharingan. Yet the end of his scar was bare and pointing down towards the black spot by his mouth. Kakashi’s pale skin was prettily pinkened, most heavily around his cheekbones. His grey eyelashes lowered oh so bashfully as he ducked his head, seemingly embarrassed to show his face.

Iruka broke the jōnin’s loose hold on his wrists and pulled him into a purposefully tender kiss.

Again, he felt dizzy and pleased as he continued to incorrectly predict Kakashi’s reaction. The alpha had been wildly aggressive in the classroom – and in the Forest Death, only a moment earlier – but, now, as their lips met for the first time, Kakashi seemed as fragile as a flower. 

The jōnin made a soft sound somewhere in his throat as Iruka adjusted them to angle together better. As if perplexed what to do with his hands, Kakashi tentatively relocated them on either side of Iruka’s head on the tree branch. The alpha bent into a plank as he lowered himself further down, following Iruka’s lead with timid but obvious interest. His Sharingan and hitai-ate were cold on Iruka’s scarred cheek, but it was the gentle flutter of Kakashi’s eyelashes that had Iruka feeling like he was the out-of-control alpha wanting and needing to fuck until his partner wept in joy.

Instead of being insanely forceful with the other man, Iruka chose to sweep his tongue along Kakashi’s lower lip, gentle but deliberate. 

And the gods were good and kind, because Kakashi parted his lips, almost confused as to why.

It was nearly impossible for Iruka to restrain himself from deepening their kiss instantly into a lewd, wet mess of a thing – something that would get Kakashi gasping – something that would burn into his brain and forever scar his eardrums all sugary-sweet and murderously good.

But, damn it, Kakashi Hatake needed this.

He needed Iruka to care for him.

So that’s just what Iruka did: he took everything as slow as his delighted body could handle. Above him, keeping an absurdly impeccable plank, Kakashi seemed totally bewildered but very, very intrigued by their relaxed kissing. He dipped down further to the point their flak jackets were touching, and their knees brushed by each other, and then –

Then they were flush against each other, Kakashi’s legs outside of Iruka’s, and his gloved fingers were suddenly pulling out Iruka’s hairtie, and the kiss went so very wild so abruptly that it was Iruka who felt the world was spinning, and he was terrified for a split second about falling out of the tree and crashing to the floor below and _fucking dying_ \- but –

With all the ability of a shinobi legend, Kakashi grabbed Iruka around the high part of his waist and then flung the both of them backward, landing on his own back and forcing Iruka to straddle him to maintain his balance. 

Instantly Iruka’s hands went to the trunk of the tree to stabilize himself. He found he was _just staring_ down at his friend in absolute shock.

Kakashi wore a small, sly smile when they made eye contact. His gloved hands dropped to Iruka’s hips, then moved further back to grab his ass, spreading his fingers and digging into the muscle. Seemingly without any effort at all, the alpha adjusted Iruka’s position atop him until –

Well, until Iruka could feel Kakashi’s clothed arousal pressed thick between his cheeks. 

His face flushed at the alluring prospect of something more serious than kissing. 

Yet Iruka was careful not to force anything between them. Similarly, Kakashi seemed to change his mind about what they had been doing, because the jōnin slid his hands back around Iruka and then down his clothed thighs. Acting pleasantly preoccupied by the white bandages wound around Iruka’s leg, Kakashi began to pick at them like one might pull petals off a daisy. He had averted his single-eyed gaze to concentrate on the wrappings; his silver brow rose contemplatively, changing his pink-painted expression.

“I don’t go into heats often,” Kakashi admitted unexpectedly. His voice seemed casual, bordering on indifferent, as what he was saying really didn’t matter at all. But Iruka knew his friend: the tone was just another element of his disguise. It was a false front to cover his divulgence of something significant and difficult to discuss aloud.

“I’ve never…” he started to say, then trailed off. As Iruka tried to decide on what to do or say, the alpha slid his whole gloved hand under the bandages with careful force. In doing so, he loosened the bindings, allowing Iruka more flexible movement of his leg. 

But Kakashi’s hand had moved closer to Iruka’s now very excited erection, and it took a hell of a lot of effort not to bring their hands together over his cock.

Iruka was fearfully distracted as Kakashi nonchalantly said below him:

“I’ve never slept with a willing partner during a heat.”

… The statement took a while to absorb, but, when it did, Iruka found himself much more attentive to his alpha friend. Still acting engrossed by Iruka’s leg bandages, Kakashi didn’t glance up at him. His lips were slightly pursed as if he was restraining himself from saying anything more than he already had. His cheeks were still quite pink, making his scar stand out.

Iruka knew better than to ask the obvious, immediate, but also cruel and stupid question, which was:

“What do you mean?”

Instead, he stayed silent for a second.

Using deductive reasoning, it seemed apparent as to what likely happened with Kakashi. At some point during puberty, like every young man and woman, his secondary sex characteristics had first presented, his being that he was an alpha. Sometime soon after, he would have had his first heat, it would have been scary and confusing, but he would have survived it. 

Yet Kakashi had become ANBU early in life.

Iruka knew that detail, even though he probably shouldn’t have. Feeling generous one ramen date, Kakashi had slung back some sake, shot him side-eye, said, “I joined ANBU when I was thirteen,” and then stood up and walked the fuck away, leaving Iruka flabbergasted at the bar.

He probably joined around when his alpha identity first manifested. Considering the potency of his pheromones, Kakashi had likely been refining them as weapons since the very start. That meant most of his partners – assuming he was fucking the people he was sent to kill – those shinobi were influenced by his militarized hormones – and Kakashi wasn’t viewing them as ‘willing partners,’ as they hadn’t _really_ chosen to be with him, not really, not at all.

So… no. Kakashi wouldn’t have had many chances to have fully consensual partners, ones not influenced by his objectives as ANBU or nin on a mission. Plus, since he seemed to elide forcefulness with his sexuality, Kakashi apparently didn’t pursue relationships of that kind around the village when he was off-duty. 

Iruka hadn’t been wrong before: his friend had appeared asexual and aromatic, but it was because he had forcibly made himself that way.

Looking at him now in the nighttime, Iruka didn’t want that for the jōnin… the alpha… his friend.

The man he loved.

Iruka’s bare hand fit perfectly over Kakashi’s, stilling his nervous plucking Iruka’s leg wrappings. He managed to attract Kakashi’s single-eyed gaze: the man seemed fascinatingly shy as they looked at each other in the moonlight. 

Speaking softly, Iruka couldn’t help but smile as he asked: 

“Would you sleep with me, Kakashi?”

And the Forest of Death flooded with magnificent alpha pheromones, the incredibly strong ones that Kakashi Hatake eternally kept at bay, all because he was so obviously impossibly thrilled by the question that his restraint went to pieces in an instant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, but seriously, S E X is happening next chapter.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, okay.
> 
> S E X - I N - T R E E S.
> 
> Well, Part 1 of 3, anyway...
> 
> ____

Iruka barely had time to utter “Oh, fuck” as Kakashi’s elevated alpha pheromones smothered both the sense and sanity out of him.

The next thing Iruka knew, his face was crushed against Kakashi’s clothed neck, and he couldn’t contain an endless embarrassingly throaty moan. After a moment of confusion, Iruka discovered he was clinging wildly to the jōnin, his skin singing with sexual electricity. With his bare mouth pressed against Iruka’s left ear, Kakashi’s dangerously hot, rough breathing continued to erase every thought in Iruka’s overstimulated mind. The man really _did_ seem out of control this time: as his heat had rushed over him, the alpha’s hands grabbed Iruka’s ass, becoming suddenly impatient and far, far too hurried.

Iruka’s eyes went wide in the darkness as Kakashi brought one hand to cover Iruka’s cock and the other slipped down the back of Iruka’s shinobi pants. The jōnin caressed Iruka’s most sensitive, sweet parts from both sides, and, damn, if it wasn’t the horrific-wonderful stuff of legend combined with Kakashi’s crazy pheromones. 

Frantic and determined not to come right away, Iruka tried forcing his head up, but he only managed to crush his lips and scarred cheek along Kakashi’s bare jawline. 

He was still breathing unstably in that spot, panicked-glorying in the pleasure rolling over him, when…

Kakashi stiffened all over. 

At first his pheromones went little awry –

… and then the scent totally vanished. The sudden cessation allowed Iruka’s dizzy brain to gather itself back together. He leaned up and back, feeling loose and drunk like he’d been smashing back hard liquor all night. His eyes struggling to stay open, Iruka tried to understand what had happened, what had changed, as he examined the jōnin underneath him.

Keeping silent, Kakashi’s single dilated eye was looking up towards the treetops. The soft part under his eye was crinkled in concentration. His silver brow had fallen slightly in silent deliberation of something. He was otherwise utterly unmoving, his entire body gone still. 

Just as Iruka was finding the ability to speak again, his mouth having become damnably dry, Kakashi’s dark gaze shifted to him in one sharp motion.

“Excuse me, Iruka-sensei,” the jōnin said in an easygoing but overly polite tone. With fearfully effortless strength, he caught Iruka under the arms and arranged both of them until they were standing. It was difficult to understand what the hell was happening: Iruka didn’t even try, his head was so stuffed with hormones. He watched Kakashi, who was now looking quite peeved, fix his mask into its regular position. 

Without any further warning, Kakashi lifted up his hitai-ate to reveal spinning black tomoe in an ocean of scarlet-red.

His Sharingan.

Iruka felt himself staring, he had no remaining etiquette left in him. 

Explaining nothing at all, Kakashi completed a truly perfect Shadow Clone jutsu, the replica appearing right behind him, and then he -

– well, then the original just vanished into the night.

Totally taken aback, Iruka could only open-mouthed gape at the new version of Kakashi Hatake that had been left behind with him. The doppelganger seemed to be every bit as Kakashi as the one that had disappeared only a second earlier. Even though Iruka immediately wanted to ascribe the clone a male identity, _it was an it_.

It was not a real creature, and it was definitely not the actual Kakashi. 

For one, its alpha pheromones were mild compared to its creator’s. Nevertheless, its heat-enhanced hormones still emanated languidly about the woods. The deception was both striking and somewhat amusing: the clone cared enough to imitate Kakashi’s hormones, but it seemed unconcerned about elevating them to the original’s level. 

The other notable difference was that the doppelganger seemed totally uninterested in Iruka.

Its eye was grey, undilated, half-lidded, and utterly bored as it stared after its maker.

The come-down from near-sex was so startling that Iruka felt himself growing hot-faced in humiliation. Wow, they had really been going at it, just, just a second ago! And now – ugh, and now he was left alone with a shadow clone acting so aloof that Iruka would have rather plummeted to his death off the side of the tree than stand next to the jutsu with arousal fading in his pants.

In fact, Iruka was just about to stroll backward away from the shadow clone, when –

“It’s the recovery team,” announced Kakashi’s copy, sounding unworried and calm. Its hands were lightly placed in its pockets, its hitai-ate covering a likely-false Sharingan. Its leisured stance was just the same as its creator - except it seemed truly unbothered down to its core. 

Without glancing over at Iruka, the shadow clone continued on carelessly, “It’s because he kidnapped a medical-nin earlier.” 

It gave a little shrug, still looking out towards where Kakashi must have headed, and ignored how Iruka startled in surprise. 

“He’ll finish soon.”

Suddenly immensely uncomfortable, Iruka turned to gaze out into the Forest of Death. He couldn’t keep track of just how fucking horrible Kakashi’s day had been – or really, maybe, how horrible his entire life had been? And he’d thought Naruto had a rough time of things, but… 

“He wants you to be his mate.”

The words rang like struck crystal reverberating about Iruka’s head. His eyes could not have been larger as he stared over at the shadow clone, which was still impossibly tranquil on its sentry watch. 

Iruka could practically feel his soul leaving his body. He stumbled through speaking the useless question:

“What did you say?”

He’d heard the doppelganger perfectly well, but there was no way his brain, so wrecked by everything that had happened over the last few hours, was going to grasp such a level-headed announcement of grand proportions and great meaning. 

Without the least bit of stress, Kakashi’s shadow clone turned to look at Iruka. Like its creator, its mask was impeccably in place, meeting its hitai-ate and leaving its expression hidden mostly behind cloth. Nevertheless, Iruka had spent enough time with the original to comprehend some of what was going through the jutsu’s chakra-created mind. 

It was amused at Iruka’s expense, an irritatingly typical behavior for Kakashi.

“I said,” the clone drawled out, turning its entire body to face Iruka. “He wants you to be his mate.” 

The Kakashi doppelganger was eerie in its replication: the visible corner of its face had a heat-inspired blush, but its features seemed otherwise serene. 

That was probably why Iruka let his guard down.

Dumb move on his part. 

Suddenly, the shadow clone had Iruka down on the tree branch, and his flak jacket unzipped, and his shirt bunched high above his chest. Iruka’s shinobi instincts swung into action, but the copied Kakashi disarmed him in a flash and tossed the kunai into the trunk behind them. The weapon lodged in the wood with an audible thunk, indicating all too terrifyingly that the clone was strong, very strong.

Its strength was made all the more obvious when the shadow clone tore down its mask – and then ran a long, wet tongue up the middle of Iruka’s ribcage – all while keeping Iruka’s arms pinned over his left shoulder with a single hand.

_Oh shit, it’s not pretending. The clone is also in heat._

The clone’s alpha pheromones were decidedly weaker than the original Kakashi’s, but they were still having a rather alarming effect on Iruka, he was abruptly realizing. His hips were doing the dumb twisting motion from the classroom, seeking out more contact between them. His hands were resisting the clone’s grip… not to disperse it… but to desperately grab at its jacket and rabidly cling to it.

Kakashi’s jutsu was even quieter than its creator as it didn’t need to breathe, and apparently felt that it didn’t need to fake it for the sake of battle. 

The shadow clone was merciless in its attention to Iruka’s nipples, pinching the left while licking the right, slow and leisured for a while, before it picked up the pace – and –

Iruka made a strangled sound of pleasure as Kakashi’s clone bit down, teasing Iruka’s nipple between his teeth, before it apologetically licked wide wet swaths over the swollen nub. 

Then – oh - hard and thick against Iruka’s thigh…!

_It’s aroused, too! What the fuck, Kakashi! Why did you leave this with me?!_

That was the only coherent thought Iruka had for a while, because, all of a sudden, Kakashi’s shadow clone seemed to notice its own arousal and how it was rubbing against Iruka’s erection as the two of them pressed together on the tree branch.

As if the jutsu creation was just now realizing its power, it thoughtfully rose one silver brow down at Iruka. Seeming to contemplate something, the doppelganger experimentally shifted its hips against Iruka’s. The action elicited such an embarrassing noise from Iruka that he flushed wildly and stared up at the clone in mild horror. 

Wrong reaction, apparently.

The shadow clone looked so very delighted by Iruka’s response that the replica’s lips curled up into a feline smile, looking like a malicious cat that had just caught a mouse to play with.

Then there was the sharp glint of a kunai in the moonlight – 

And –

_Oh God, it – it cut my pants off??_

Iruka should have been astonished or offended, but instead, the hormonally-charged part of him was desperately excited by the shadow clone’s insistence. Even though he knew it wasn’t really Kakashi, he found himself tugging at the replica’s flak jacket, trying to rid it of clothes. After all, how could they do anything when it was only him without his pants, with his shirt ridden up, with his desire on full burning display?

Kakashi’s single eye was pretty and hotly focused on Iruka’s delirious gaze as he bent down between Iruka’s newly bared thighs…

_Wait, no, no, this isn’t Kakashi, this is his clone, this is – oh, fuck, oh fuck -_

The shadow clone’s lips felt all too real as they slid up Iruka’s ready cock. Its tongue was even better, strong and wet and simply loving, taking its time going from the base to the tip, over and over again. 

Far too sultry for its own good, Kakashi’s doppelganger kept eye contact the entire time that it lavished intimate attention on Iruka. With its hitai-ate in place but its blue mask pushed down to its throat, with its pink-painted pale skin and long thin scar and small black beauty mark, the shadow clone looked perfectly like its creator. 

Yet, even in Iruka’s most graphic dreams, he’d never imagined Kakashi going down on him so lusciously nor making that dark sensual sort of expression!

The clone suddenly looked back hard left into its blind spot.

Where the real Kakashi had jumped up onto the branch – 

\- and then -

\- Kakashi slammed his knee into the dead center of his clone’s face.

Without the least bit of fanfare, the doppelganger dispersed into a grey puff of smoke.

Most alarmingly, that happened between Iruka’s bare brown thighs, something he’d never remotely considered in his life. He would have felt more ashamed, but there was a crazy, wonderful, horrible aura coming from Kakashi Hatake as the alpha stood stock-still before him, looking down with both his dilated eye and his continually whirring Sharingan. 

It was making black spots splash across Iruka’s vision. 

It was making him feel weak, unable to maintain his hold on the branch.

It was – it was –

_He’s jealous._

“Kakashi,” Iruka whispered hoarsely, reaching up a shaky hand. “Please come here.”

Without a second’s pause, the jōnin dropped to his knees, replacing the shadow clone. As he took up the space, Kakashi’s alpha pheromones went into disarray, and, oh, they were the real thing. The sweat was sharper, more pungent. The brilliant heaviness felt like a weighted blanket all over Iruka’s mostly nude body. The wanting ache intensified marvelously down in his groin.

This was his Kakashi…

It was no surprise when Kakashi’s fingers found that familiar place, and fortunately, as before, they were slick and generous in their careful preparation. 

But this time Iruka was desperate for real attention, real love. He pulled Kakashi forward by the neck, carefully brushing his palm over the man’s uncovered scar as he did so. 

Their subsequent kiss was long and wet and warm in all the right ways. 

Incredibly skilled in the obscene arts, Kakashi was somehow able to maintain his pace between Iruka’s thighs – and their kissing – and keep them both laid down and balanced on the branch.

Overwhelmingly relieved to be back with his person, Iruka deliriously murmured between kisses:

“Welcome back, Kakashi...”

And then, after a moment, he ordered breathlessly, pulling back and looking deep into both of Kakashi’s lovely mismatched eyes:

_“Now fuck me.”_


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, these two...
> 
> ___

For a second, Iruka was concerned Kakashi didn’t hear him.

The jōnin simply stared back at him, the Sharingan slowly and continuously whirling. His other eye continued to have its thin circle of dark grey, even as dilated as it was. Still flushed pink, Kakashi maintained his careful pace in preparing Iruka like he hadn’t heard anything at all. 

So they just looked at each other as the moments passed ever more strangely and confusingly.

Then, as if the demand had finally sunk through a dozen armored layers, the alpha’s silver eyebrows suddenly went high on his forehead. His half-lidden eyes didn’t widen, but instead he blinked a few times consecutively, seemingly caught unaware by the comment. 

Iruka couldn’t help but laugh a little between unsteady huffs as Kakashi responded by nodding with increasing enthusiasm. He was apparently in full agreement, which was good, because Iruka was beginning to worry that he would have to be forceful this time around. 

Instead, the alpha swiftly resumed use of his jōnin-level strength. Ever so soundless in his movements, Kakashi rapidly unzipped his flak jacket, undid his pants, pushed his clothes down, and firmly grabbed Iruka’s bare waist. Briefly looking amused at Iruka’s startled expression, Kakashi swung them both backward, recreating the same position from before the recovery team had so rudely interrupted them. His erection was yet again caressing Iruka’s backside, making Iruka turn even redder, something that seemed impossible just a moment earlier.

Unable to control his instantaneous reaction, Iruka dropped his hands on Kakashi’s shoulders, then shoved aside the man’s flak jacket, clutching the familiar high-necked blue shinobi shirt. As his skin hummed with excitement, Iruka clenched the alpha’s thick muscles as the other man looked up at him with truly dangerous dissimilar eyes. 

It was ridiculous how much their restraint had gone out the window in the last hour – hell, during the course of the entire evening. The shredded remains of Iruka’s pants had completely fallen off, leaving him clad only in a ruffled shirt and open jacket. He was intimately straddling the jōnin’s bare abdomen, and, gods be good, Kakashi was unbelievably toned. Even in the sparse moonlight, Iruka could count the alpha’s abdominal muscles, so many dark shadows of sharp lines on crazy-white skin. His own brown thighs made for a distinctive contrast between their bodies, but Iruka realized he liked the look of it, the way his darker skin slid smooth against Kakashi’s scarred pale flesh. He wasn’t embarrassed by his physique, particularly not with the jōnin below him so obviously memorizing every inch of his exposed body with both his original eye and rapt Sharingan. 

Even without Kakashi’s powerful pheromones making him lose intellectual prowess, Iruka felt hotly overwhelmed with what was oh so definitely happening between them.

Kakashi was exquisitely hard against him, pressed so close to… 

Iruka adjusted himself so he was sitting up more; Kakashi’s cock naturally moved even more into position. As he placed one bare hand on the bark and settled the other on the alpha’s shoulder, he gave Kakashi a ready look, one less coquettish and much more commanding.

He relished the rush of pheromones that whooshed out of the jōnin’s control.

They were so fantastically satisfying that Iruka could barely concentrate on Kakashi entering him. He was fully out of it when the alpha swiftly reached under the back of his shirt and went straight for his wicked scar. Suddenly returning to open-mouthed panting, his eyes growing heavy, Iruka dipped his head down low as Kakashi pushed in – then out – and then –

Then, just like that, Kakashi started _fucking_ Iruka without any sense of decency or mercy.

Holy hell, there was nothing in the world that could have prepared Iruka for getting so hungrily fucked in the dead of night in the Forest of Death by a legendary jōnin. Seemingly only two seconds ago, he’d been thinking his laidback friend hadn’t ever jerked off even once in his life, and now – well, now -!

Utterly vicious all the way down to his very bones, Kakashi watched Iruka with both eyes fixed on his lust-flushed scarred features, all while he thrust with such strength and speed that Iruka could only dazedly and vaguely notice the skin on kneecaps was getting scraped raw against the tree bark.

He couldn’t even imagine what Kakashi was feeling, his bare back and ass scouring repeatedly against the same rough wood, but then again –

The alpha was nearly glowing crimson he was so blushing so hard. 

The grey had disappeared out of his right eye: there was only black again, vast beautiful black.

His gloved fingers ravenously searched Iruka’s scar, discovering every bit of regrown tissue, tracking every change in the twisted crevice. Even as he thrust repeatedly into Iruka, staring up at him with all the wild power of a jinchūriki, Kakashi ceaselessly moved his hands up and down Iruka’s back. His fingernails, clipped short, scratched wondrously against the sensitive skin. They caught on the edges of the scar. They delved into its deepest points.

Iruka heard himself moaning, but shame was no longer a known concept, and he instead took advantage of their seclusion in the darkness, deep in the Forest of Death, and –

\- and, oh, did he _moan._

Compared to earlier, Kakashi was in much better control of himself now uninjured but still in heat. Yet the alpha was so very obsessed with gripping Iruka’s back and his scar while fucking the last coherent thoughts out of Iruka’s head that he seemed a whirlwind of activity and power and lust and – and – 

“I could smell you a mile away,” Kakashi said suddenly, his voice dark, breathy. The jōnin’s dissimilar eyes remained locked on the dark blush on Iruka’s scarred cheeks; he didn’t even look up to meet Iruka’s dazed gaze directing down at him. Absolutely relentless in his thrusting and in his scar-worship, Kakashi explained, sounding delirious but also determined to be perfectly clear, “Your pheromones – they’re faint – but they’re _yours._ ”

Iruka couldn’t keep his eyes on Kakashi’s, the Sharingan being a disturbing sort of distraction, so he looked further down at the alpha’s mouth, watched Kakashi’s tongue anxiously wet his lower lip. 

Still moaning with each and every thrust, feeling like he was caught in the worst fire-based jutsu, Iruka was unreasonably impressed that Kakashi was trying to say something, anything.

“Iruka, I –”

_Oh, that sounded **desperate** …_

Forcing himself to endure the Sharingan, Iruka stared back down at Kakashi and found him looking so truly piteous that it absolutely took Iruka’s breath away.

He moved his hand from the jōnin’s shoulder to his scarred cheek, instinctively trying to comfort the other man, although regarding what he wasn’t sure.

Instantly Kakashi leaned into Iruka’s palm, closing his eyes, still constantly moving into Iruka, still touching his scar, maybe even harder now, with even more passion, even more zeal.

The alpha’s chest was heaving, his legs were strong and working overtime in his movements, his pinkened pale skin was slick with so much sweat he nearly shone in the moonlight. 

“You’re beautiful, you’re so beautiful,” Iruka found himself saying like he had discovered something divine out in the wilderness, and then he was hastily leaning down, and they were kissing so hard, and Kakashi was out of breath, and his eyelashes were fluttering light and wet against Iruka’s tingling scarred skin, and his fingers loving the worst marred mark of Iruka’s body, the darkest part of Iruka’s past, and – and –

There was no need to touch himself, there’d been enough contact brushing against Kakashi’s crazily cut abdomen, and Iruka felt the pleasure cascade up through him like lightning, making his hair stand on end, his world becoming bright bright bright –

But, oh - oh! – Kakashi wasn’t there yet! – 

Iruka barely could absorb what was happening as Kakashi twisted them both about until the alpha was suddenly kneeling, his sandals propped under his ass and supporting him. Somehow he’d arranged them so Iruka’s own still-sandaled feet were now flat on the branch, and Iruka only kept his balance by landing both hands behind himself, snatching roughly at the bark. 

Fortunately so insanely strong, the jōnin grabbed Iruka’s ass and lower back, keeping him entirely off the tree. He was holding Iruka so high up that Iruka’s half-spent cock was now rubbing sweetly, agonizingly against the other man’s sweat-saturated shirt around his sternum. Continuing to be all the more brutally insistent, Kakashi chased after Iruka’s mouth in the new position, and then _fucked_ him like that, the angle oh so different and delicious and making Iruka _just whine_.

The alpha pressed his kiss-swollen, obsessive lips on the side of Iruka’s bare neck, and –

There Kakashi breathed so deeply that it seemed like he was soaking up Iruka’s very spirit, and, damn it, damn it all, if the same unbelievable refrain didn’t pound over and over again into Iruka’s brain at the same bewildering pace and amazing timing as Kakashi’s thrusts into him:

 _Bite me, bite me, **please bite me**_.


	11. Chapter 11

Instead of losing the last of his dignity, Iruka forced his way into a messy embrace of his friend. The momentum caused Kakashi to alter his stance; the man dropped down to sit on the wood. Iruka much more obviously settled into a lotus pose against him. Emanating pheromones at an erratic pulse, Kakashi seemed on the edge of orgasm but also like he was holding off. 

Yet even in the new position, the alpha went for Iruka’s neck, running his bare nose against the sweat dripping down Iruka’s skin. 

Before he could resume their fucking, Iruka made himself say the other option, the logical one, the one that represented his real worries about what was happening between them.

“I’m not an omega,” he whispered, his voice unsteady. It was embarrassing to hear how quiet he’d become while stating the obvious, but there was something horrible in saying it aloud… They couldn’t be biologically connected mates, he was a beta, Kakashi was an alpha, _he was such an alpha_ , he deserved an omega who could handle him, really please him, someone so suited for him that their bodies met and matched like magic…

A few seconds of silence later, Kakashi situated Iruka to sink even further down on his cock. The change in sensation resulted in a high-pitched sound that Iruka really had not imagined he could ever make. He dug his nails into Kakashi’s muscular back, accidentally scratching down as his oversensitive body attempted to submit to such an unexpected but breathtaking feeling. 

Unable to handle everything, Iruka collapsed his head down onto Kakashi’s shoulder. 

The jōnin instantly said into his ear, somehow sounding reckless and frenzied in two words:

“I know.”

Weirdly, horrifically, tears pinpricked at the corner of Iruka’s eyes. He was now clutching his friend, so terribly panicked and upset that – that they were having this conversation – that he wasn’t able to be Kakashi’s perfect person, partner, mate – that they couldn’t be –

He was definitely not expecting Kakashi to catch his earlobe between his teeth, biting down hard enough that pain signals blossomed and spread sharp petals throughout his overexcited yet terribly exhausted body.

As Kakashi went to say something else, Iruka found himself hissing into the alpha’s clothed shoulder, the physical pain warping badly with his deeper private struggles:

“You can’t really smell me. _I’m a beta._ We don’t –”

Ugh, damn it, damn it, damn it.

Iruka felt out-of-body, floating in black skies by twinkling stars, and he felt trapped down in the dirt, stuck up to his neck in thick consuming mud, drowning in the darkness and suffocating soil.

He suddenly threw back his head, staring straight into both of Kakashi’s beautiful but truly alarmed eyes, and then Iruka demanded, strangled in his unsettled grief, destabilized down to his very core: “Why do you keep trying to bite me? You know it won’t do anything.”

Then there was the sort of pause that made life seem forever-long and just-too-short. 

It was so frighteningly like when red licking flames and falling stones and flying debris had rushed through Konoha all those years ago, eating up people, turning sweet family homes into burnt broken rubble – 

It was the moment so painfully hot when he’d confronted Kakashi in front of the Hokage and the other jōnin, and shouted at him, furious beyond reason, and he’d been crushed by the alpha’s flat rejection and embarrassed by his failure as a sensei and shinobi, and he’d slunk home and cried into his open palms, in the dark sitting on the floor, alone, so very alone –

It was the moment when Kakashi had slipped through his window in the middle of the night, red blood still seeping through his ANBU uniform, his porcelain mask chipped and showing its raw underneath, and Iruka had cradled the alpha in his arms as Kakashi breathed so terrifyingly unstably, saying nothing, looking past him to stare the moon and stars with his open Sharingan coated with dried enemy nin blood –

It was like those moments, it was those moments, it was –

It was worse than those moments.

Kakashi was so very remote as he stared back at Iruka… it was insane to think that the jōnin was _still inside him_ , fully sheathed, continuing to sweat profusely from their stalled sex. 

Nevertheless, that was exactly where they were, what they were doing. Iruka was deadly reminded of reality as Kakashi pulled him forward into a one-armed taijutsu hold. He crushed them together, his battlefield instincts on full exhilarating-traumatizing display. He was clearly refusing to let Iruka back away, get away, escape the situation by whatever means necessary.

Pressed into Iruka’s wild loose hair, Kakashi inhaled once, long and steady, surprising Iruka and causing his whole body to tense. He realized deep down that the other man was about to state something, something… significant.

The alpha continued to surprise him as he said with flawless composure:

“It may be biological impulse or ingrained sociocultural imagery, I don’t actually know.”

Unfairly sensual in his heat, Kakashi nudged his nose along the sweaty strands of Iruka’s hair. His hands relocated with terrifying force to Iruka’s upper back on either side of his scar, the one from the giant shuriken flung into his flesh by his spine. Kakashi continued to speak with perfect clarity, even as he exuded pheromones like he was drunkenly unable to control his movements:

“Iruka… I promise betas have pheromones.”

Then Kakashi said in a low whisper, one that caressed the soft space by Iruka’s jaw, where a keen kunai could have cut his jugular vein pumping blood fast to his concern-clouded brain:

“I’ve known your scent for a long time… I love it.” 

There, above Iruka’s vein, under his jaw, the jōnin kissed ever so delicately, his lips like the tips of feathers.

By all the gods witnessing Iruka’s destruction, Kakashi persisted in his sweet cruelty, because then his teeth were oh so lightly grazing lower on Iruka’s neck, dropping down and backward to where omegas were bit. The two rows of teeth making crescents on either side of the spine… 

And it was just like Kakashi said. 

Iruka wasn’t sure if it was his heightened beta pheromones wanting something old and instinctive and evolutionary in response to Kakashi’s heat-elevated, weaponized hormones – 

Or if it was the image that he’d always seen in their romance-soaked world of alphas and omegas who sealed their bond in sharp teeth sunk into such a bare vulnerable space – 

All of a sudden, Iruka found that he was breathing crazily, his skin flushing harshly all over. His grip on Kakashi had gone from grief-stricken to lust-filled in only a few seconds. He was abruptly remembering that Kakashi was _still inside him!_ , and his hips moved on their own, shifting down, taking in more, and – yes – yes – yes –

Kakashi took the unsubtle reminder of what they were doing and started fucking him again.

Fuck if Iruka wasn’t hard again, and he found he was moving more, desperately wanting everything that Kakashi could offer. Actually, now he was taking it for himself, something that was apparently much appreciated by the alpha, who became more enthusiastic in his thrusting, his strong gloved fingers digging into the cheeks of Iruka’s ass to bring him up and down. 

His teeth became ever sharper as Kakashi focused more on Iruka’s sweat-slick neck. 

Although his brain felt like it was melting in a boiling hot mess, Iruka could just hear Kakashi confessing into his skin over the loud, wet slaps of their bodies repeatedly coming together:

“I want you to be mine. _Only mine.”_

The very same thought had scarred Iruka time and time again.

It had propelled him to become a better shinobi, to fight harder during their sparring sessions.

It had caused him to hold Kakashi’s jacket tight in his classroom just a few hours earlier.

He recognized the pained desperation, the selfish greed, the hopeful desire.

_Look at me._

_Only me._

_**Please.** _

Unlike so many other times between them when Iruka had no ability to concentrate, his brain blown right to bits, his body crying in incredible pleasure, this time –

This time, Iruka was in control as he employed every skill he’d perfected as a shinobi and a sensei, closing his eyes and clinging hard to the other man.

He said into the still darkness, his voice clear and calm in the Forest of Death:

“Please, Kakashi... make me yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof. 10 minutes late. 
> 
> Let's have another chapter of sex tomorrow to make up for it.


	12. Chapter 12

Kakashi bit him.

Even though Iruka had been expecting it, wanting it, wild surprise still flew through him as it finally happened. He shot upward, startled out of his mind, and his nails dug deeper into Kakashi’s back, breaking the skin, drawing blood. Soon there was a bizarre feeling of relief – and fulfillment – and _pain, fuck, that hurt, that really hurt_ \- but there was also – 

The alpha’s hips stuttered to a stop as he released Iruka’s neck. 

He moved his head back to meet Iruka’s gaze. 

Oh, Kakashi’s Sharingan was just dazzling, and his other eye was so, so dilated. Both were slit in immense satisfaction. His silver hair was swept back in total disarray. His pale skin shone with sweat in the moonlight. Blood – Iruka’s blood! – dotted two spots on his lower lip, and, while staring straight at him, Kakashi slowly licked it off in a feral show of love.

Iruka forgot how to breathe… 

_His alpha friend was exquisite in his conquest._

The jōnin’s subsequent smile could have burned villages to ash, it was so hot.

Iruka felt his flush become splotchy as his pain receptors numbed out from all the adrenaline and cortisol running rampant through his brain. Hiding his giddy smile, he grabbed both sides of Kakashi’s face and hurriedly pulled him closer so they could kiss once again.

Their kiss stayed innocent for a single second before it went truly depraved. It wasn’t clear who first brought them down the darker path, but suddenly they were there. Both of them were harshly breathing and messily sweating as Kakashi took to fucking Iruka with seemingly electrified strength. The alpha’s gloved hands were zealous holding Iruka’s ass; he would be leaving bruises, lots of beautiful bruises, each and every one an imprinted memory of lustful obsession. Iruka couldn’t help but hang onto the other man, even as he closed his eyes and gasped at each powerful thrust, Kakashi hungrily swallowing each of his passionate moans.

Through it all, they kissed with wildness consuming their hearts, minds, movements…

And, then, gloriously, oh so gloriously –

Kakashi pulled back an inch, his whole body quivering, his eyes warming like sunlight. His hands tightened even further on Iruka’s ass, each of his fingers digging into Iruka’s skin and muscle as if he was afraid Iruka would vanish before him. The Sharingan went spinning at a shockingly high speed as Kakashi’s cheeks somehow deepened even more to a nearly entirely burnt red. 

The jōnin’s choked whisper sent streaks of frost and chill up Iruka’s spine.

_“Iruka…”_

It was so very wonderful to watch Kakashi as he orgasmed… that Iruka was absolutely unprepared for the subsequent few seconds where the other man looked dizzily at him, flushed up to his ears and down into his high-necked shirt. The pulsing of Kakashi’s cock within him… the rush of wet warmth… As he slid down from pleasure, the alpha gradually slowed his pace, all the way until they were sitting locked together in the soft darkness of the Forest of Death. 

Kakashi was breathing strangely as his gaze roamed over Iruka’s blushing scarred face. Finally, his head tilted back and his grip on Iruka lightened. The jōnin’s eyes simultaneously fluttered.

On his left side, the Sharingan spun even more to become an astonishing red and black blur. 

Then it completely stopped.

It froze.

And then -

Kakashi passed out.

The consequence was instantaneous and terrifying: the jōnin had been holding them in place on the branch, and, now unconscious, they both started to fall out of the tree. Fortunately, the dangers of the classroom with rowdy mad-genius children had prepared Iruka to act quickly in suddenly horrendous situations. Even as his brain screamed in literal horror, he caught Kakashi with both hands, slammed him against the tree trunk, got off of the man’s hips, and stood like a bewildered soldier over his blacked-out friend. In this new position, Kakashi’s cum naturally leaked out of him, joining their endless shared sweat, making Iruka wince in surprise. 

As he leaned down and stabilized Kakashi, Iruka noticed he was heavily breathing from the new adrenaline rush taxing his exhausted body. Fear trickled through him: he could tell some part of him just wanted to pass out, too, and surrender to a terrible fate, oh so worn out and drained.

_No!_

_Now is **not** the time to quit!_

Without thinking it through, he reached inside his open flak jacket, took out three soldier pills, and downed them while one-handedly forcing Kakashi’s dead weight against the massive tree.

It took a few seconds, but thankfully Iruka had taken the highest dose and then tripled it, so when the medicine did kick in, his brain swam with excitement and intensity, and the solutions to his problems all poured out of him at once.

First there was the rapid hand formations for a Shadow Clone jutsu while he pushed Kakashi’s unconscious body against the tree trunk with a single sandaled foot. He’d never balanced one-legged on the branch doing the jutsu, but the soldier pills and his determination paired incredibly well, dampening any mortification about being half-dressed and covered in cum. 

His clone was fortunately fully clothed, had his hair tied up, his hitai-ate put in place – and it did not look like it had been twice fucked by an alpha in heat during the last few hours.

The replicated version of himself stood horizontally on the tree trunk with its arms crossed over its flak jacket, staring down at Iruka’s expectant expression and Kakashi’s slumped over form.

“Don’t even,” Iruka warned, feeling ridiculously embarrassed. 

His clone only smirked at him. 

It hung upside down and grabbed onto Kakashi’s flak jacket to keep the alpha in place – then slanted an impressed look upward at Iruka. 

The other Iruka inquired in a delighted tone, “Do you need my pants?”

Blushing furiously now for new reasons, Iruka shook his head and ignored his shadow clone. Instead of stealing his own creation’s trousers, he used a Transformation Jutsu… of himself… wearing all his normal shinobi-sensei clothes… and not looking so thoroughly sexually satisfied. 

Again, it was not something he had used before, but damn it, this was already the Day of Insane New Things, so let’s fucking go already.

He didn’t discuss anything with his clone: they were already perfectly in tandem with each other. That hadn’t changed, even after his affair with Kakashi… his shadow clones were always quite like him, fierce in their protection of others (including him, which was strangely sweet), self-sacrificing to the point of furious mania. Just like Kakashi’s clone, his seemed very aware they were temporary and spent no time regretting anything or contemplating the long-term consequences of their behavior. Still, Iruka had always been blessed with shadow clones that swiftly, unquestionably, assisted him in whatever abnormal setting they’d been created.

Very distantly thinking of the clones that had helped him intervene with Mizuki to rescue Naruto, Iruka reached down to his dead-to-the-world friend.

He barely had to gesture to his copied self to aid him in picking up Kakashi’s very loose body, it was already there and waiting. The clone hoisted the alpha on Iruka’s back in such a way that he wouldn’t just drop off. Iruka tried to ignore how bizarre it felt to maintain a Transformation Jutsu when underneath he wasn’t wearing pants, let alone boxers, while he was wet and sticky everywhere with sweat and cum and blood. 

The shadow clone looked over them with a meticulous eye, seemingly critical that it would work, but it shrugged when Iruka threw it a silently concerned look.

“You’re ready,” the clone clarified and then reached over to pet Kakashi’s sweaty hair once before pulling the jōnin’s hitai-ate down over his Sharingan. The jutsu looked at Iruka a bit worried. “Should I come with you?”

His first instinct was to say no and dismiss his creation, but the soldier pills were making him jittery and the world a little unstable… so he nodded, and they started for home.

Iruka was unbearably grateful for his shadow clone as they made it out of the Forest of Death. There were a few lingering monstrous presences that made him stumble, but his replica caught the both of them and guided him from tree to tree like Iruka was at risk of falling apart. Although Konoha was cloaked black in the dead of night, the village was still full of twinkling natural and artificial lights, allowing both Iruka and his copy to navigate the rooftops. 

Even though he managed not to slip on anything – and to jump rather gracefully from building to building – it was his shadow clone that stopped suddenly and turned around with a kunai tightly held in its hand.

It looked positively livid, like someone was trying to burn down Konoha.

What really was happening was -

The ANBU was not one that Iruka recognized, but she was clearly targeting Kakashi. Her body and masked face angled towards the alpha hung on Iruka’s back as she stood on the roof. Of course, Iruka knew she was not alone, but the rest of her team must have been totally hidden from view. There were certain tell-tale signs that she was an omega… but Kakashi’s pheromones were oddly contained in his unconscious state… and so she reacted not at all to the powerful alpha draped limply across Iruka’s back.

She turned towards Iruka, continually disregarding his shadow clone, and seemed to be about to say something or do something. Strange frantic anxiety seized Iruka: he was terrified for a second that he was going to have to fight an ANBU for his friend. Worse, the soldier pills, adrenaline, and his protective nature were combining in such a way, that he was _really, very convinced_ that’s exactly what he was about to have to do. He was just about to drop Kakashi and prepare barrier ninjutsu to stick her in place and then use taijutsu to avoid her teammates -

They were both surprised by the sudden insistence of Iruka’s copy, who stood taller, stepped between the ANBU and its creator, and announced with real resolve, “He’ll be safe with us, I swear on Naruto’s life.”

As red-hot anger crashed through him, Iruka stared poison-soaked daggers at the clone, his wrath definitely showing through his Transformation Jutsu. Waiting around had made the alpha sag down his back, and so he forcefully adjusted Kakashi, lifting him up and grabbing the jōnin’s arms once again. Yet his furious attention stayed on his own jutsu creation: he was thinking rapidly about murdering it for daring to use Naruto as – as – an oath book or a promise ring!

The ANBU focused on the clone as well. She appeared remarkably intrigued by the comment. 

Then, just as silently and swiftly as she appeared, she glanced back over at the real Iruka and vanished in a swirl of leaves.

Immediately Iruka’s shadow clone ducked its head and darted forward towards its creator’s apartment, obviously not wanting to deal with the consequences of its proclamation. The temporary creature was lucky that Iruka was so very preoccupied by the alpha jōnin on his back, because otherwise he would have been thrilled to stab himself in the heart for making such a terrible sudden statement. Mercifully, there were no other interruptions as they neared his place. His clone was purposefully efficient in pulling down the wards and opening the door for Iruka and their beautiful but unconscious burden.

Ever so quiet, the shadow clone behaved all too similarly to its creator. Without being asked, Iruka’s physical replica helped bring Kakashi in his near-comatose state into the bedroom. Between them, they situated the alpha vertically in the bed above the sheets. The two of them exchanged near-blushing stares, before the clone, in all its heedless quick-thinking, stated firmly, “We should undress him, wash him, and put him in pajamas.”

Oh, Iruka did not want to do any of that, but that’s why shinobi-scientists made soldier pills and shadow clones were created. Between the two temporary measures, he found the energy, strength, and moral courage to implement his jutsu’s plan. There was something very uncomfortable and truly odd about undressing Kakashi Hatake, the Copy Nin, his dear friend… the alpha who had just sunk his teeth into Iruka’s neck… undressing him _for the very first time._

But Iruka’s shadow clone seemed to feel very little discomfort with their task. Utterly blasé, it pulled off Kakashi’s pants and boxers, flawlessly tossing them atop the pile of used garments Iruka had made. Without discussing a thing between them, Iruka and his copy wet towels, cleaned off the yet-again-dirtied jōnin, and went through the awkward process of putting Kakashi’s long, lifeless-seeming limbs into Iruka’s loosest clothing. The whole thing might have lasted an hour from start to finish – from the clone’s creation in the Forest of Death – to –

“You’ll be fine,” Iruka’s shadow clone abruptly said to him. 

He looked up; he realized he’d become absurdly tired all of a sudden. Oh… the soldier pills were wearing off. After all the stress and activity and chaos, his physical function was finally failing. 

The clone put a gentle hand on his shoulder - but then gave him a wide dazzling smile. 

“I promise on Naruto’s life.”

Unthinking fury swamped him. So Iruka punched his clone in the face – which was a terrible, stupid decision – and he landed on the bed a second later, clutching his silly sore nose. The hard hit had been enough to disperse his creation, which was obviously its idiotic, mean-spirited, self-harming plan. As Iruka pressed his palm up against his throbbing face, he had to admit… in real irritation… that he was much more willing to pass out now that he was in new sorry pain.

He climbed up to lay beside Kakashi, who was carefully tucked under the covers. 

Somewhere in the back of his head, a little tiny voice was saying something about his Transformation Jutsu… but… 

He instead surrendered to the sentimental instinct to cuddle his poor unconscious friend. 

As fatigue finally caught up with him, Iruka closed his eyes, concentrated on the weird wonderful pain radiating from the back of his neck, and slipped away into sleep.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's see if we can't get a more regular schedule, shall we?  
> 
> 
> ___

Acid churned about Iruka’s stomach, crept up his throat, burned his mouth. He sprang out of bed, tripped over a pile of discarded clothes, and barely made it to the bathroom before he vomited up everything in him. Cold sweat flooded his face and back: Iruka pawed at his wet hair before he went back to clutching the toilet and throwing up in horrible bouts. There were several dragging moments of confusion as he stared down at his bare brown legs… his dark pubic hair… then his blue shinobi shirt… and standard-issue flak jacket. His knees and thighs had a weird feel to them as he ran his palms over the skin. They’d been badly scratched over and over.

For some unclear reason, Iruka slowly brought his hand upwards and slid it over the back of his neck. There… there was a strange pain by his spine. Perplexity morphed into queasy worry as his fingers touched the spot. Even with his higher-than-normal shirt collar, the skin was always on full display. Now, with his ponytail down, he had to brush aside strands of sickly wet hair to find… two indentions crescented under his loose hair by his spine.

Two small scabs in particular made him flinch.

Dazed and acting on semi-conscious memory, Iruka reached down between his thighs and… oh, oh no…

There was dried cum there, and - ugh, on his shirt, too! - and also his jacket??

His bleary brain could not handle so much disorientation in the early morning. Unable to shake such awful confusion, Iruka proceeded to take perhaps the worst shower of his life. There were broken sticks in his hair; he had to tweezer three different ticks out of some truly private places. He was even more baffled to find that he was close to chakra depletion, something that almost never happened to him. While he hadn’t been drunk in months, there was no denying this felt a lot like one of his shitty hangovers from throwing back too many shots with his beta friends at the bar.

Fortunately, his nausea faded under the deluge of cold water. If he wasn’t so concerned about his chakra reserves, Iruka would have used a healing jutsu for all the peculiar damage he’d sustained, but really, none of it was so bad, even the odd omega-style mark on his neck.

Huh. What a thing to do to a beta.

Just what kinky motherfucker did he hook up with last night? 

Feeling puzzingly exhausted, Iruka wrapped a towel around his waist and wandered back into his bedroom. He’d purposefully chosen an apartment with lots of large windows, which was probably foolish for a shinobi, but he needed every bit of light in his life after working long hours at the Academy and mission desk. In the early morning hours, sunrise struck his bedroom window in a rather nice way. It wasn’t so horrible to wake up and get the day started with such pleasant sunshine inspiring him to seize the day.

Not today, of course. 

Oh, no. Today, he was going to shove his face under a pillow and pass back out.

Thankfully, class wasn’t in session today, so Iruka could slink back under the covers and sleep. There probably wasn’t enough coffee in the world to recover his memory of last night. Later he’d use a healing jutsu to dull the pain and hope the bite mark went away. Weird to know that someone in Konoha had… had bitten him like an omega. Iruka felt a bit pissed off as he thought about it: it had probably been another beta with an unfortunate obsession with alpha-omega dynamics. After scratching idly at his facial scar, Iruka rubbed at his eyes, taking off his towel with the other hand.

“… Iruka-sensei?”

There was a forever-long moment of stillness where the world stayed the same, the very same.

But then… 

With mind-bending slowness, Iruka pulled his hand off his face and gazed down at his bed.

Kakashi Hatake – his close friend and legendary jōnin – was staring at him. His dark eye was so full of concern that it made Iruka regret everything in his entire life at once. The man had propped himself into a sitting up position in Iruka’s bed with his legs still hidden under the covers. His hitai-ate was properly aligned over his Sharingan, but there was no trace of his mask. Most of his dangerously lovely face was revealed in the sunlight. Kakashi was wearing Iruka’s nice pair of pajamas, the midnight blue ones. They were Iruka’s favorite set. 

Oh… Kakashi looked scared down to his bone marrow as he beheld Iruka.

It was such a foreign thing to witness that Iruka stared for several seconds too long.

Unpredictably, he registered the jōnin suddenly moving far too quickly, and gut instinct made Iruka step forward and exclaim in instant-teacher-voice panic: “No! Don’t!”

As his shoulders trembled slightly, Kakashi fumbled the end of the hand formation for a Body Flicker Jutsu. His hands froze midair as he stared at Iruka. His expression was so truly terrified…. It was nearly impossible to comprehend this was the same elite shinobi who Iruka had once seen shove crackling lightning through an enemy nin. It had been on their botched mission together years and years ago, before Naruto had both separated and then united them. During that exhilarating but excruciating moment, Iruka had realized why the jōnin was so feared. 

The vast majority of the time – from Iruka’s childhood to their most recent sparring session a week ago – Kakashi Hatake had remained perpetually aloof and unreadable. 

Not now, though.

Now Kakashi was wide-eyed, motionless, and… 

… wearing Iruka’s pretty pajamas and a blood-splattered hitai-ate… 

… while sitting in Iruka’s bed… 

… bathed in beautiful sunlight.

This was beyond atypical. _This was fucking surreal._

There was no immediate clear way to respond, so Iruka found himself standing totally nude and in shock in front of an equally traumatized nin. He couldn’t even muster up feelings of being violated when Kakashi’s single-eyed gaze lowered down Iruka’s body, spending way too much time around his badly scratched hips and thighs. 

Instead, Iruka was trying to recall just how they had gotten here, together, in his bedroom. Why the fuck was he in ruined mission-grade shinobi gear while Kakashi was wearing Iruka’s nicest and most comfortable pajamas? Why did he feel so damn hungover? Not just physically, but emotionally, like his human spirit and heart had been crushed together under an earth jutsu?

A sudden realization struck him, smashing his brain through a freezing cold shower.

_They must have been together last night!_

The same epiphany seemed to strike Kakashi at the exact same moment.

The jōnin’s gaze snapped upwards onto Iruka, searing through time and space. He no longer looked panicked. In contrast, Kakashi wore an expression that Iruka horrifically remembered from their mission together, the one that had gone wrong all those years ago. It was pure incomparable intensity. It was commitment to a task until its very end, no matter what that might be. It was forcefully righting the worst-made mistakes of the last few minutes.

“I don’t remember what I did to you,” Kakashi announced in a cold voice. With disturbingly easy grace, the silver-haired man slid out from the covers and stood beside the bed. The effortless movement was a chilling reminder that this was a jōnin, an elite shinobi, a retired ANBU. 

And… right, Iruka always forgot: Kakashi Hatake was an alpha. His skill was embedded in his sex. 

Even wearing Iruka’s darling blue pajamas, Kakashi stayed supreme. His very presence – now that he was being intentional about his power display – made Iruka want to step aside and drop his eyes in submission. It was something akin to killing intent, but worse somehow. There was a strange shivering sensation that slipped along Iruka’s nude body; he felt an unusual heat collect on the front and back of his neck. He swallowed hard, repulsed by his abruptly dry mouth.

Iruka registered that Kakashi had moved towards him with impossible silence.

Then the jōnin alpha was – oh – 

Kakashi was standing behind him!

Before Iruka could spin around, Kakashi caught both of his arms and twisted them into a tight taijutsu hold, forcing them high up Iruka’s bare scarred back. A terrible combination of shinobi instincts and their sparring experience sent Iruka thinking and moving in double time, ridiculously unconcerned that his opponent was once again the Copy Nin, Kakashi of the Sharingan. His right foot went for Kakashi’s as he tried to backwards head-butt Kakashi, both of which failed as usual, but –

Iruka kept up the curving motion as Kakashi tensed at his resistance.

Then Iruka did something he’d never tried during their improvised fights.

He bit Kakashi’s cheek.

Hard.

Obviously not expecting _that_ , the jōnin loosened his hold.

Iruka elbowed Kakashi in the stomach and flung himself forward onto the bed. He spun around, preparing his best barrier ninjutsu, hoping that he’d win this one, please, gods, please. 

The split second that he whipped through the motions, all Iruka could remember was the look on Kakashi’s face during that horrible mission when Iruka had made the mistake – a flash of darkness crossed Kakashi’s face – one eye going black, so very black – the Sharingan showing dark streaks in a blood red sea - and cold swift death for the seething enemy standing over Iruka -

Yet that wasn’t who was before him.

Instead, Iruka stilled his hands as he witnessed an unbelievable transformation.

Kakashi slumped down like he’d lost half his skeleton at once. His one exposed eye wasn’t tracking Iruka’s shaking body: he seemed to be looking through the wall behind the bed. Although both of his hands were empty, it appeared as if Kakashi had dropped something precious and was mystified by its loss. His lips parted just slightly; his expression went totally stricken.

Unable to stop himself, Iruka scrambled off the bed and approached his friend. 

Concerned out of his mind, he found himself asking desperately, “Kakashi-sensei?”

At the call of his name, the other man’s gaze drifted over to Iruka. His voice sounded hollow as he answered in the most distant tone Iruka had ever heard him use:

“I bit you.”

… apparently, Kakashi had _not_ had the same epiphany as Iruka had earlier, that they’d been together last night and had some kinky sex adventure in bed. Even as he tried to not flush from his ribcage to his eartips, Iruka felt his body respond with a rush of red heat. The rolling warmth caught him by surprise, causing him to pull back his hand from touching Kakashi’s shoulder. 

As his gaze fell, Iruka pictured himself somewhere else, in soft moonlight, far above the soil, and he was panting desperately, he was clinging to Kakashi’s neck, he was gripping the man’s thick muscles everywhere he could, and Kakashi’s biceps bulged against his shirt and flak jacket as the man reached down to grab Iruka’s ass harder with Iruka clawing at his back until it bled.

A jolting glance downwards revealed blood under Iruka’s fingernails.

His own pained, wanting whisper came back to haunt him. 

_Make me yours._

Oh, oh, they hadn’t just spent the night together! They had fucked, a lot, so much, so many different ways, in his classroom and the Forest of Death, too?? That explained the twigs – ticks – chemical astringent smell – empty pheromone cleansers! It must be why he was so weirdly sore, everywhere, including -! And had he confessed his love to Kakashi? Wait, was he remembering things correctly? Had Kakashi turned to look at him and told him with satisfied self-confidence, ‘He wants you to be his mate’?!

Hang on.

No.

A shadow clone had confessed for Kakashi. 

Suddenly, confusingly, Iruka could visualize a version of himself leaning close… to himself… so he could caress the Kakashi’s silver sweat-soaked hair and shift his hitai-ate back into place… and there was this sugary feeling flowing warmly through his veins… feeling so much like milk chocolate melting…

So Iruka had used a shadow clone, too… and his jutsu copy had felt innately protective of them.

Vaguely, distantly, Iruka realized his clone had been fixated on the bite mark on its creator’s neck as they ran through Konoha. Now that he was considering the memories of his other self…

Wow, his clone loved Kakashi.

So much that it hurt.

Ah, that was a part of this confusing feeling. Why he was sore all over and felt so spun about… It wasn’t just the soldier pills or the really, impossibly great sex… It was because -

_They’d always liked each other._

This wasn’t just Kakashi’s heat.

This wasn’t his friend anymore.

This was his - 

Staring deeply into Kakashi’s single grey eye, Iruka barely heard himself say:

“I asked you to bite me.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, these two dumb darlings...
> 
> ___

A single raven caw’d outside.

Kakashi just stared at him.

Oh so slowly as the seconds passed… Iruka remembered he was nude. Panic surged through him: he’d never imagined this situation happening, but it was certainly worse being naked in front of Kakashi. Blushing wildly, Iruka sat down on the edge of the bed and hid under the covers. He was surprised that this sort of vulnerability mattered to him after all they’d done together, but he still clutched at the bedsheets like they were keeping him from drowning.

As Iruka moved, Kakashi’s stare followed him. His grey eye was flat, his expression blank but bordering on bewilderment. Even though he had been cruelly effective a moment earlier in restraining Iruka, the man now seemed like a gentle breeze could carry him away. 

Discomfort made Iruka turn to lecturing. It was a very bizarre instinct, but he realized he was doing it anyway. Bedsheets covered his waist to his thighs, leaving his long brown legs bare along with his chest. Yet now with his new intention, Iruka peered upwards at the other man, hoping to illuminate the mystery of last night. 

“You remember coming to the Academy and taking me up to the classroom, don’t you?” he asked, but it was more of a rhetorical question. Certainly, Kakashi remembered bits of last night, even if it was in a distant hallucinatory manner. Iruka’s assumption was all but confirmed as the jōnin’s half-lidded eye closed briefly and then opened to look at him more seriously. 

Kakashi had blinked… a real rarity for him.

He must be thinking.

So Iruka continued, his voice low but resilient: “I said you and I could…” A little humiliation tripped him up, but he persisted in his explanation. “That we could be together, even though I was a beta… We had sex. Afterward… you seemed to wake up, and then you ran away to the Forest of Death.” 

There was no denying it: he was rambling now, not lecturing. This was a loose and fast monologue dictated to a shocked audience. The atmosphere worsened as Kakashi continued to stare at Iruka, his distress visibly intensifying, his mostly-revealed face becoming ever pinker. 

Iruka absently noted his hands were shaking as he gripped the bedsheets over his lap, but he would endure, _he had to endure._

“I cleaned up, went after you, found you. I think you met with the recovery team. Then we… had sex again. I asked you to make me yours, so you… bit me.” 

It felt terrible to be pleading with Kakashi as he looked up at the jōnin and described their time together… but… that’s what he was doing. He was trying to jog the other man’s memories. He was desperate for Kakashi to recall how their bodies met, the way his fingers dragged into the darkness of Iruka’s scar, his obsession with Iruka’s neck and how his teeth had sunk in deep….

Unfortunately, Kakashi remained absolutely still when Iruka finished talking. His expression had stopped transitioning away from detachment and stuck on confused incomprehension. Although he’d been good at maintaining eye contact with Iruka, as several more silent moments passed, Kakashi’s gaze dropped further and further down until he was staring at Iruka’s bare feet resting on the hardwood floor. He was impeccable in his poise, which frustrated Iruka so fucking much as he was nearly crawling out of his skin with anxiety.

Yet Kakashi was jōnin, he was ANBU. Shoulders stayed motionless. Breathing stable. Skin just barely painted pink, below his usual mask-line. Hands touching the edges of Iruka’s nice pajama pants, ignoring that the cloth hung a bit too much on his sharper hipbones. 

Iruka really could only think one thing:

_Please, please, don’t run away._

The other man moved oddly, and at first Iruka thought Kakashi was trying to flee.

But, no, Kakashi was just stumbling forward. He landed solidly on the edge of the bed beside Iruka and shook his head several times back and forth in evident disbelief. Turning his cold-burning attention down to his own hands, Kakashi seemed to be wondering how it could have all happened without his complete understanding of the situation. 

He looked so pitiful that Iruka abandoned the bedsheets and touched Kakashi’s arm, the one without the red curving ANBU tattoo. 

When the jōnin cautiously looked his way, Iruka made sure to smile, soft and reassuring. That was apparently not what Kakashi had been expecting, because the silver-haired man straightened out of his disappointed slouch and lowered his gaze once again to Iruka’s slightly exposed thigh. Before Iruka could be totally overwhelmed with embarrassment, Kakashi’s bare hand – so lean and finely-built – slipped over the bedsheets, and his fingertips traced over –

Oh, Kakashi had left bruises.

So many bruises.

Iruka found himself staring wide-eyed at the segment of his brown thigh not covered by the sheets. He hadn’t been able to see it in the darkness of the bathroom, nor had he enough energy to notice in the sunlight, but Kakashi had left brutal marks of love on Iruka’s already dark skin. The broken blood vessels were the precise size and shape of the alpha’s fingers, which Kakashi himself confirmed as he pressed his three longest fingers flat against Iruka’s thigh, lining them up with the worst observable bruise. 

“I was rough with you,” Kakashi murmured. He sounded contrite and burdened by guilt, unable to believe what he’d done. Seemingly unthinkingly, the jōnin curled his fingers up into an arch and then brought them back down, spreading them once again over the bruise on Iruka’s thigh. 

It was too much, far too much.

With his body half-twisted to see Kakashi, Iruka felt his physiological reaction take on new life. Being only a chūnin-sensei, he had very little ability to control his increasingly erratic breathing. His mouth was going dry. His eyes fluttered at the tingling electricity where Kakashi’s fingers were caressing close to his hip, where the alpha had grabbed him so recently. He felt so nude suddenly, and Kakashi was dressed so informally, it was like he was seconds away from being bare, if only they were both so bold in the early hours of the morning…

Kakashi surprised him by requesting quietly, “Can I see where I bit you?” 

After nodding in the most delirious, distracted way, Iruka turned his head and drew aside his shower-wet hair, revealing the crescents that he had felt in the bathroom. Without directly facing Kakashi, it was impossible to gauge the jōnin alpha’s reaction to what he’d done, but it didn’t matter, because… 

Iruka could _feel_ Kakashi’s heavy gaze on him as he considered the wound.

The other man hadn’t pulled his hand off Iruka’s thigh. Instead, Kakashi stopped his stroking and was now loosely cupping the curve near Iruka’s hip as he observed his victorious mark. 

Although Iruka had thought he’d be able to say something, every bit of salvia evaporated from his mouth, and his thoughts scattered to the wind. Unable to hold his hand up any more, Iruka gracelessly dropped his arm to his side. He realized all too sharply that he was showing Kakashi his back scar – the broken memory-soaked tissue he remembered the jōnin had found so fascinating during sex – along with the clear bite indentations on the back of his neck. 

Even though he’d been vulnerable in a dozen different ways with Kakashi by now, this… 

Somehow this was the worst.

Or… was it – maybe… – the best?

Kakashi leaned forward so very carefully, Iruka could almost picture the movement. His sensitive skin lit up like festival fireworks, sparkling truly creative shapes, as the other man tilted his head with his breath hot and humid on Iruka’s neck – and – and - 

_Oh fuck, he’s biting me again!_

Damn his dumb, eager cock for responding with such delight!

And damn the lustful whine that immediately escaped his throat!

Kakashi’s teeth were light as they grazed the same crescents he’d left the night before. Yet, in recognizing Iruka’s fantastic response, Kakashi reacted as if he’d been ambushed, suddenly switching over to start something serious, serious, serious.

Because, all of a sudden, Kakashi bit down even harder, his hand gripping Iruka’s thigh with unbelievable strength. Instantly his other arm wrapped around Iruka’s bare shoulder and chest to hold him still in an instinctive desire to keep him in place. 

There was a strange shift in the bedroom during their unexpected embrace, and it took Iruka a long, disoriented second to realize –

“You’re still in heat,” he moaned in wondrous recognition, squeezing his eyes shut. Unable to control himself, not fully, maybe not at all, Iruka grabbed Kakashi’s encircling arm with both of his hands. He adjusted his head forward to let more of his hair part out of the way. Kakashi naturally followed him, letting go for just a second before seizing the skin again, going even deeper than the first time. 

_Shit, I should never have turned my back on him! Don’t show your back to predators! Why did I agree to let him see my neck?? Of course he’s just going to bite me again!!_

But, unlike last night, Kakashi wasn’t showing the other major symptoms of a heat. His alpha pheromones remained totally in check, not swamping the bedroom, not dizzying Iruka. It was confusing at first, because Iruka was so lust-flooded and dumbed-numbed by the sensation of being bit and embraced by Kakashi Hatake, the man he’d crushed on for oh so long, but…

Suddenly, Iruka remembered this exact jōnin and their shared sparring sessions, how Kakashi always won their bouts, but more than that, how he always caught Iruka by surprise by – 

By touching the same damn spot that he was now biting!

What the fuck!

Righteously empowered by his epiphany, Iruka jerked his head and forced Kakashi to release the back of his neck. In the same furious motion, he turned on the other man, who he found looking so ridiculously dazed and flushed that it nearly stopped him from unleashing hell. 

But, oh no, this shit was going to get answered – now.

Dark eyebrows narrowed, scarred face thrown in a scowl, Iruka prodded Kakashi’s chest, right above the second button his own familiar pajama shirt. The words spilled out of him, supported by the throbbing pain by his spine and the searing exhaustion trying to drag him down. 

“You poke me there during practice!” Iruka accused indignantly, shoving his finger against Kakashi’s sternum several times in a row. “Just how long have you wanted to bite me?” 

His questions were ceaseless, rising in heat and intensity, as well increasing as noise level. 

“Why didn’t you say something?” 

Iruka turned even further around and crossed his arms hard over his chest, now outright glaring at the other man. He used his most scolding voice as he demanded, a shadowy storm crashing over his scarred features, _“Kakashi, how long have you been interested in me?”_

Astonished remorse burned through Kakashi’s reddened expression. His lips were slightly swollen from biting Iruka so hard. He looked like he’d been kicked through a lightning storm.

When Iruka opened his mouth to snap out something mean-spirited, unable to grasp what the fuck was going on here, Kakashi finally responded by –

By looking down at the crumpled bedsheets beside them and blushing with stupefying shyness.

“Since I chased you through Konoha.”

Iruka didn’t just feel perplexed, he felt absolutely confounded. His arms loosened over his chest as he craned to see more of Kakashi’s tantalizingly revealed expression. 

“What do you mean…?”

Not so much the elite shinobi now, faintly flushed and completely mortified with himself, Kakashi took a few sincere seconds to answer.

“You kept pranking people. They sent me after you.”

The complexities of life never ceased to amaze… As his brain slammed puzzle pieces together, Iruka stammered out, almost disbelieving what was being revealed, “You were the ANBU who ran me ragged all over town when I was a kid?”

Kakashi looked very much like he wanted to die.

Iruka just stared at him.


	15. Chapter 15

Eventually, Kakashi couldn’t handle the pressure. He cracked in a truly tremendous way. One second, he was a shy schoolboy, wanting nothing but to fade into the sheets. The next –

The next second, the jōnin was looking right at Iruka - no, _right through him._

“You asked me to bite you,” he repeated in an even tone. With the Sharingan still guarded, Kakashi’s grey eye locked onto Iruka like he had spotted an enemy across the battlefield. The alpha’s subsequent question rose high above the bedroom, burned bright in the sunlight. “Why?”

For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to Iruka that the tables might turn on him. Now that it was happening, he felt his nudity in the fullest, worst way: he tugged the bedsheets back over his groin and tried desperately not to look at Kakashi in the face. Somehow, he’d been preoccupied by the thought of catching Kakashi in his secret romantic interest, but – admitting his own long-term crush…?

His silence was not what Kakashi wanted, which the jōnin made known by moving forward and catching Iruka by the chin. Ridiculous strength paired with deadly grace meant that when Kakashi lifted Iruka’s head, the feeling wasn’t about force but impressive intent and concern.

“Iruka,” Kakashi said in a hard voice. “Was my Sharingan open when you asked me to bite you?”

The memories were fuzzy, full of sex, scented strongly with blood, sweat, and hormones. There was Kakashi’s masked mouth on his back – but, no, that was in the classroom. Thinking about it more intensely, with better focus, Iruka could just barely recall being an incredibly intimate position with Kakashi on a tree branch in the Forest of Death. The whole idea of _that_ was stunning and impossible, but… but they’d really done that, they’d been together, there, in that way. 

Yes, Kakashi’s Sharingan had been open. Scarlet-red sea, black markings, spinning without end. 

“It... was,” Iruka reluctantly admitted. He couldn’t look up at Kakashi. It seemed like he was being tricked in some fashion, that the alpha was trying to get out of their shared experience. 

He was not wrong.

Kakashi’s fingers dropped from his face; the jōnin looked greatly displeased. Silver brow furrowed, his mouth sloping into a frown, the other man could only shake his head to show his further dissatisfaction. 

“I knew it,” he muttered, strangely harsh. Kakashi then spoke as if his words were stinging wasps trapped his mouth, furiously spitting out each word. “I forced you.”

In a distinctive feeling of déjà vu, Iruka found himself clutching onto Kakashi’s newly free hand. Desperation was running amuck in his system: he was shaking more than a little. Looking increasingly distant, Kakashi watched him, clearly thinking a million different things and sharing not a single one with Iruka. 

That wasn’t good, that really wasn’t good.

“You only had it open because ANBU came looking for you!” Iruka explained rapidly, ignoring how frantic he sounded. He didn’t want to Kakashi to think he’d been caught in the Sharingan, or a genjutsu, or by some trickster combination of alpha hormones and those two. He’d wanted this! He’d wanted – well, he’d wanted the whole thing, now that he was being truthful with himself! Maybe not all the repulsive blood everywhere their first time, or the genuine fucked-upness of declaring a love confession during the night in the Forest of Death, but the rest…!

Although he seemed to be mentally retreating, Kakashi obviously noticed Iruka’s upset. His grey eye returned to Iruka’s nude form, considering the extent of their lovemaking made in bruises and other marks. His subsequent silence was unnerving, but in his cold demeanor, Iruka began to notice something else.

Kakashi was very embarrassed – and very worried. 

Just why had he gone after Iruka so brutally this morning after realizing they’d slept together? Why was he so focused on his fear of forcing something between them? How he could really think he’d… he’d rape his friend, rape Iruka? Sure, Kakashi had apparently been interested long before Iruka even knew his actual identity, but, to think –

“I thought you were really cool, during our mission together, the one that went bad.”

It was an insanely silly, even sentimental, admission, but Iruka barreled right through it. It was easy to see Kakashi’s attention shifting as he heard the remark. The jōnin’s exposed eyebrow quirked just so slightly, the way it always did when he was curious about what was happening before him. There been many other moments when Kakashi had done the same thing, when Iruka had made him rethink something or brought up a good point or scolded the shit out of him after doing what Kakashi frankly but stupidly thought was best at the time.

Iruka tried to keep them close together as he continued a bit more demurely, “I’m sorry I’m not stronger and faster. I know I could be better.” He looked up and met Kakashi’s intrigued eye. “I’m not an omega, Kakashi-sensei. I’ll never be one. But…”

His hand moved on its own accord, lifting upward and sliding across the alpha’s bare cheek, the one opposite his scar and the Sharingan. Almost instantaneously, Kakashi’s skin went pink: he blinked several times in a row as well. Struck with sudden renewed embarrassment, the jōnin consequentially went absolutely still. 

Kakashi’s reaction only empowered Iruka; he felt infinite warmth fill and fluff his insides. Realizing his own cheeks were also flushed, Iruka murmured, soft and sincere, “I want to be with you.”

There weren’t any alpha pheromones to smash through the bedroom, nor was there an instant reaction of grabbing wanton hands and bruising kisses. Instead, Kakashi looked like he’d been tossed off the side of a mountain mid-battle and was contemplating how many bones would break by the time he hit the bottom. 

Through it all, Iruka thought idly, distracted, in love: _Kakashi’s cheek is so nice and warm._

Finally, Kakashi was able to speak, and he said in a far-off tone, his single grey eye gone wide, “I think I should tell the ANBU outside your apartment to leave.”

Iruka immediately dropped his hand, and he twisted around, staring out the massive (thankfully curtained!) window in his bedroom. “What?!” he exclaimed. “There’s ANBU here??”

Looking like he’d drifted out beyond the stars, Kakashi pointed with one long pale finger at several places: right above them, directly out the window, and to Iruka’s front door. 

“I thought they were here to arrest me, but I was wrong,” the jōnin alpha surmised aloud, sounding somewhat surprised by the realization. “I was going to hold you back from fighting them on my behalf, but…” His grey eye flickered to the front of the apartment. “Huh. I… I guess they’re here because they’re worried about us.”

Iruka had much less capability to control himself or be interested in the thought process of elite shinobi. Instead, he wrapped his bedsheets around himself, and, before Kakashi could really understand what he was doing and thus try to stop him, Iruka went to the window, yanked aside the curtain, and shoved up the glass panel. As expected, he couldn’t see the definitely-there-ANBU, but it didn’t matter, because Iruka was absolutely done with this nonsense – right now, forever.

“I am _fine_ ,” he shouted at seemingly nothing. Below his apartment, his downstairs neighbor had been watering her plants without a worry in the world. Now she was craning her neck to stare up at him, her forest-green eyes widening to the point of it being absurdly funny. 

It was not funny, though, not to Iruka, who decided to glare outright at the rain-gutter that stuck out on the red-tiled rooftop, assuming that was the best spot for an ANBU to hang out.

“Kakashi-sensei and I are dating, but that’s none of your business!” he scolded the invisible three-man team, totally unwilling to let them off the hook for being overprotective, highly-skilled perverts. Even though he knew the out-of-sight ANBU were leagues superior to him, Iruka stuck out his index finger and shook it at the rooftop. “I know you have better things to do than see what’s happening here.” Then he brought up both hands and gestured firmly at the hidden shinobi. “Shoo! Go away! Leave us alone!”

There was a little shimmer at the spot he was staring at – then – 

To his immediate lower right, there appeared an ANBU porcelain mask with bright red lines, followed by the long lean muscular body of what was clearly one of Konoha’s top-tier ninja. He recognized her after a confusing moment: she was the omega shinobi from the night before. He and his shadow clone had confronted her when she tried to stop them as they travelled across the village. 

“Tell Hatake he needs to report sometime today,” she said in a sharp, clipped, but amused voice. She clearly had been on the rooftop, where Kakashi had pointed to, right above them. Her head tilted, visibly considering Iruka from only a few inches away. He suddenly realized that he was nude but for the bedsheets and blushed, but the ANBU only laughed under her breath before she pleasantly added, just to Iruka, “He really wanted to be with you last night. My team only just got out of the genjutsu he used on them.”

Almost instantly, a second ANBU appeared on the opposing rooftop – and then gave a rather rude gesture to the general vicinity of Iruka’s apartment – before he disappeared just as swiftly in a swirl of leaves.

There was nothing restraining the omega ANBU’s laughter now. She patted Iruka’s hand on the window and confided lowly to him, “It was a very sexual genjutsu – filthy stuff. I’m pretty sure Raven came in his pants.” Just as Iruka started to relax, feeling strange camaraderie with the dangerous elite shinobi hanging onto the wall of his apartment, the ANBU switched up on him. Her voice was remarkably hard as she abruptly ordered Iruka: “Do not travel through Konoha without cleaning up ever again. You trailed Hatake’s cum through half the village. I expect better from you, Iruka-sensei.”

Before Iruka could fall out of his window from humiliation, the omega ANBU gave him a curt little salute – and then vanished into nothingness, leaving behind only a single floating leaf.

In an absolute daze, Iruka closed the window, avoiding the very curious and alarmed look from his downstairs neighbor. He pulled the curtains closed with one hand and corrected the wards, dropping his bedsheets to complete the hand formations. Barely able to comprehend what had just happened, he really wasn’t thinking straight as he turned around to talk to Kakashi again.

The alpha jōnin was still sitting on the edge of the bed. However… now his Sharingan was unconcealed, his hitai-ate removed and put aside. Both of Kakashi’s eyes were fixed on Iruka as if he were the most unbelievably interesting thing that had ever existed. And, of course, Kakashi was still very much wearing Iruka’s favorite set of midnight blue pajamas, wonderfully maskless and blushing all over. 

Although he could have made an easy quip about Iruka’s sudden nudity (damn, he’d thoughtlessly dropped the sheets, exposing himself again!), instead Kakashi asked in the most tender, vulnerable, touching tone:

“You want to date me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These guys should have sex again before the story ends, don't you think?


	16. Chapter 16

Iruka was incredulous. Forgetting his nudity, he instead gave Kakashi a truly disapproving look.

“You don’t have sex with someone where they work then in the Forest of Death and sincerely get to think, ‘We’re definitely going to be normal friends after this,’” he chided the dazed-looking jōnin sitting on his bed. He shook his head at the very audacity of the idea.

But he felt oddly uncomfortable with the comment as soon as he made it. It sounded too much like he was saying ‘either we date, or we won’t have any relationship at all.’ Reaching down for the bedsheets, feeling abruptly like he was doing everything wrong, Iruka considered correcting himself. Unfortunately, though, he finally became much more concerned with being naked in front of his friend, long-term crush, and last-night lover.

His distraction became an issue - because Kakashi suddenly leapt out of the bed and knelt in front of Iruka, his hands folded together and held up in the mimicry of prayer.

Iruka was so startled that he clutched the sheets higher up on himself as if he was a woman with something to protect.

Kakashi’s Sharingan was open and strangely fascinating as he announced in earnest, “I don’t want to be normal friends. I want to date you.” The alpha’s mismatched eyes crinkled a little as he quietly added in a much more pitiful voice, “I want to hold you again.”

Well, that was far too much for Iruka to handle, even on his most stalwart of days. He found himself down on his knees, moving quickly to hold Kakashi’s hands in his own. Swallowing down his embarrassment, Iruka forced himself to confront the ugly truth while dreadfully and sadly looking at the jōnin, “But you don’t even remember us being together.”

The alpha had been looking quite genuinely distressed up until now. However, upon hearing Iruka’s remark, Kakashi visibly controlled his expression. He shifted back into neutrality as fast as a keen-edged kunai slicing through the air. When he started to pull his hands away from Iruka’s, the jōnin became so intent on escape that it took considerable effort to keep him in place.

Too much frustration and weirdness combined together: Iruka abruptly turned his displeasure on Kakashi. He’d had a hell of a morning from throwing up in the toilet and tweezing ticks from his scratched-up thighs and scolding the ANBU who were lurking like perverted parrots around his apartment. 

He held Kakashi’s so tight that he could feel the man’s bones. 

Iruka enunciated, sharp and biting, as he stared unforgivingly at Kakashi:

“What. Is. It.” 

The alpha looked mysteriously distant even while held so intimate and close. He had more of his usual demeanor about him: he shut the Sharingan, his half-lidded grey eye was undilated, his body kept loose and unstressed. Yet there was no denying how much of this was for show. 

Just a second ago, Kakashi had been wracked with tension and concern… 

Now he seemed ready to stride off into the sunset, bringing up his book of softcore porn, waving dismissively over his shoulder.

The ridiculous façade provoked Iruka enough that he outright glared at the man.

He snapped in a scolding rebuke: 

“Kakashi.”

The jōnin instantly melted into a mess. He’d been a flower the night before; now he wilted. In a single crazy-fast rush, Kakashi admitted, looking like he might suddenly cry or turn to a pile of ash:

“I’ve fantasized about you so much I can’t make out what actually happened between us.”

It was Iruka’s turn to look dumbfounded and stunned. His grip loosened on the alpha, but instead of running away, Kakashi leaned forward and added in an incredibly contrite tone, his bare face revealing obvious regret, “I assumed I forced you during my heat, acting out a fantasy. I always think of you when I have heats. I usually just stay at home and get through it, but I always think about you and what we might do together, and this time it actually happened.” 

He paused, wincing to himself, as Iruka stared and stared, unable to speak or respond.

“You say we had sex in your classroom,” Kakashi explained, his voice lowering, as his grey eye remained on Iruka, seeming as pained as the rest of him. “That’s something I think about a lot… It doesn’t surprise me that I brought us there.” He appeared even more apologetic as he continued, a stronger blush rising to his dissimilar cheeks. “I’ve even thought about us together in the Forest of Death, so that’s not new territory, either. Anywhere you can think of… I’ve already thought about it.”

Feeling impossibly appalled, curious, and excited all at once, Iruka heard himself ask, “… where else?”

The alpha jōnin clearly noticed the change overcoming Iruka: his grey eye widened a little in response, and he swallowed out of slowly emerging nervousness.

Still looking at Iruka from only inches away, Kakashi said, much breathier than before, “The mission desk, during your shift or after it.” 

That fantasy was an easy one to picture as the jōnin frequently visited Iruka to hand in reports and update him on Naruto’s progress. There was a nasty little pleasant buzz in the back of Iruka’s mind, reminding him of all the times that he’d leaned forward oh so hopefully towards the alpha, wanting to be more than friends but never having the courage to start anything. 

“The training fields when we’re sparring.”

Oh, Iruka fantasized about that, too. Somewhere between rapid-paced taijutsu and fireballs scorching the soil, Iruka would be caught off-guard, and Kakashi would flip him down on the ground. They’d been out of breath, staring at each other, so tantalizingly close. Sometimes Iruka had Kakashi initiate things by grinding against him, whispering dirty filthy things while covered in sweat and reeking of all the alpha pheromones that he never, ever showed.

Other times Iruka grabbed Kakashi and kissed him wildly, and he fucked Kakashi on the training fields, making the jōnin cry out and beg for more, harder, deeper, more, now.

“On top of the Hokage Rock.”

Kakashi was so close as he spoke, Iruka could feel the man’s breath, his tension, his excitement. They had both leaned forward almost without realizing it, each still kneeling on the floor. There was a weird wonderful anxiety in the air, like they were teenagers trapped in a tight space, having to confront their crushes after so much avoidance and heartache.

Iruka’s mind was inventive: he could imagine them together above the faces of the Hokage in a dozen different ways. Fully dressed, partially dressed, totally nude. Daytime in the morning or midday, nighttime right at sunset or in the deepest part of moonlit darkness. The feel of worn stone, jagged rock, under his palms. The delirious but focused look of Kakashi’s grey eye – black dilated eye – Sharingan, slow – Sharingan, spinning like in battle – as he gazed down at Iruka in heated worship. 

He didn’t dare now to look down at Kakashi’s mouth; it would have betrayed his growing sense of urgency, although the alpha himself seemed equally on edge. 

Iruka maintained their shared gaze of awakening hunger as he asked aloud, trying to keep his voice steady, “What position…?”

Immediately, Kakashi’s half-lidden grey eye went sultrier. With his Sharingan already shut, Iruka found his focus staying on the right, noticing how the jōnin’s eye dilated some but not fully at all. He was beginning to realize – with them oh so close to each other, their noses nearly touching – that Kakashi actually _wasn’t_ still in heat… even though he had just bit Iruka again.

He did it because he wanted to bite Iruka. Not because his hormones urged him to do so.

He had purposefully chosen to bite Iruka again.

The alpha jōnin was unfairly graceful and obscene as he answered Iruka, a high blush on his cheeks, making his scar pronounced and his face somehow even prettier, “You’re on your hands and knees, I’m behind you. I want you to see Konoha.”

There was a pause: then it was Kakashi who broke their heart-throbbing, breath-taking gaze.

Iruka filled to the brim with butterflies as Kakashi’s grey eye noticeably dropped down to Iruka’s kiss-bruised lips, still swollen from the night before. 

The final words of his reply shot through Iruka like lightning, producing shock and thrill throughout his entire exhausted body.

“I want Konoha to see us.”

Then, with the lazy beauty of an alpha, jōnin, man far too stunning for his own good, Kakashi looked back up at Iruka. With the bedroom’s atmosphere already thick and heavy with promise and desire, it only took Kakashi, handsomely blushing, his face finally bare, dressed down wearing Iruka’s pajamas, to gaze steadily back at him - and then slowly, unconsciously lick his lips and bite at their very edge.

Iruka _launched_ himself at the man, not even realizing he was implementing parts of their practiced taijutsu. Unlike usual spars, when Kakashi bounded backwards, disappeared, or used a Substitution jutsu, the alpha jōnin simply accepted being laid out underneath Iruka. They were instantaneously kissing, long and hard and impassioned, as if both of them were simultaneously realizing that they could really do all those things, they could really be together in all those places.

Sometime after Kakashi’s hand dropped down to perfectly match the bruises he’d left the night before, and Iruka had gasped loudly and lewdly into the alpha’s neck, he forcefully pulled up and stared at Kakashi, hot and bothered, wanting and desperate.

Iruka declared sincerely, breathlessly, “We should – again – this morning.” As Kakashi’s right eye widened and his hands clenched harder at the love marks, Iruka just barely was able to admit to him, full of hope and fragile need, “I want you to have something that you know is real.”


	17. Chapter 17

They stumbled into bed.

Seemingly obsessed with the bruises he’d made, Kakashi arranged Iruka in the same lotus position from the night before while smoothing his hands over Iruka’s injured thighs. The alpha looked captivated by his fingers aligning so flawlessly with the marks. He almost didn’t notice the consequences of repeatedly rubbing them… until Iruka shifted against him, his over-eager erection pressing against the nice satin pajamas Kakashi was still wearing. 

Kakashi’s attention redirected immediately and with real fascination. His right hand abandoned one site of adoration for another. Even though his palms were gentle, the jōnin’s fingertips were rough from a lifetime of cruel experience. Yet the calluses and scars made for a truly electrifying touch as Kakashi worked to memorize Iruka’s arousal. The effect was absolutely dizzying: Iruka could _feel_ his body wanting instant gratification, to lift up and push down on Kakashi’s own enthused cock just behind him, to tighten Kakashi’s hand around him and make him stroke harder and faster all the way to his painfully quick peak. 

He began blushing more in embarrassment than pleasure after recognizing his adolescent impatience.

But Kakashi himself was no better. The alpha might have been in total control of his pheromones and acting just like a beta in many ways, but…

“Did you moan my name in the classroom?”

Oh – oh, Kakashi’s voice was deep, resounding, meaning more than casual flirtation. His eyes were cast down on Iruka’s cock along with his right hand, while his left purposefully traced the bruises he’d left in the Forest of Death. They could easily have been fucking right now; the alpha could have taken him without much preparation at all. 

Instead, this slow hellish torture was having the same damn effect - making Iruka lose his mind. 

Iruka could hear how strained he’d become as he weakly replied, “I think so. You seemed surprised when I said your name.” A secondary flush of surprise flew over him as he remembered Kakashi first finding that lovely spot within him. The alpha had gone still, appearing shocked that he’d managed to do so. Feeling both excited and bashful, Iruka forced himself to add, “You made sure to prepare me… and...” He knew he was bright red as he finished in mortified haste, “You got me off. You wanted me to come.”

Kakashi looked up at him instantly. He held a rather unreadable expression for a moment, but then – then he smiled the same small, self-satisfied smile from the Forest of Death. “I did?” he asked rhetorically, sounding relieved but also quite pleased with his past self. The alpha’s half-lidded and visibly dilated eyes betrayed just how interested he was during this particular sexual encounter, even as he still seemed faultless in his self-control. 

It was literal agony to witness Kakashi Hatake in his sexual glory. Every fantasy Iruka had _ever_ had seemed to pale in comparison to the real thing. The pink blush was prettier, the silver hair was more metallic and finer, and Kakashi was astonishingly strong, both in body and willpower, as he held them close together and never surrendered to the easy option of lust. 

The alpha jōnin moved forward, their chests nearly touching. Iruka’s bare skin brushed against the delightful feel of his own pajamas on the other man. Those dangerous eyes – the ones that entranced him during sparring sessions, at the mission desk, at the ramen booth – saw his every desire and seemed thrilled with the lascivious discovery. Impossibly in his element, Kakashi was unapologetic and blunt as he stopped just short of kissing Iruka…

He inquired in a casual tone far too light for the situation:

“Did you order me to fuck you?”

… Ah, yes. Yes, that had happened. Iruka could vividly recall saying those words as he stared into Kakashi’s dissimilar eyes while they sat intertwined on a tree branch in the moonlight. They’d already been together in the classroom; the shadow clone had already had its way with Iruka. There was the smell of blood and fungus in the air, and alpha pheromones aplenty, and Iruka’s heart had been pounding with want.

He found his voice and answered as best he could.

“Yes - and you did.”

Kakashi’s face was so new to Iruka, it was difficult not to study his pale skin and be intrigued by the black beauty mark and its enigmatic previously unknown existence. Kakashi’s smile was equally amazing: before Iruka had only seen its shadow underneath twisted cloth, but now it was out in the open and meant just for him. The alpha was just shameless and so so pleased as he smiled at Iruka, looking less like the shy thing from certain earlier moments and more the serene sex god who dominated Iruka’s entire body with powerful hands and deep thrusts.

He spoke with coolness and serenity, but his was a whispered hot-blooded demand. 

“Say it again.”

Something urged Iruka to move his hands from Kakashi’s satin-clothed shoulders to draw his fingers back into the man’s silver hair. He raked his nails across the alpha’s scalp, causing Kakashi’s eyes to narrow even further and his jaw muscles to clench. Finding no embarrassment within himself whatsoever, Iruka leaned forward and kissed the jōnin, slow but self-assured. There was barely an inch between them when he pulled back and said in a deliberately strong voice:

“Fuck me, Kakashi Hatake.”

Then he remembered something else he’d said the night before, so he added it using the same willful challenging tone: 

“Make me yours.”

Kakashi’s subsequent smile could have turned the world a blinding white, it was so brilliant. 

Kakashi didn’t kiss him back – no, instead, the alpha was abruptly two saliva-wet fingers deep inside Iruka. His mouth was on Iruka’s neck, his lips curling back, his teeth digging in and catching muscle. His spare hand grabbed Iruka’s ass in the same area as before, but this time, there was no heat agitating the alpha, meaning his attention to detail was absolutely unbelievably deadly. 

Instead of his gaze and actions floating about, Kakashi was forcefully adding new marks to Iruka’s body, making sure that this sober version of himself had some influence and left something behind. He was fantastically silent through everything, leaving Iruka to fill in the quiet of the bedroom with enthusiastic breathing and the occasional pointed gasp when Kakashi found such damn nice spots all over him, even and especially within him.

The alpha’s cock was just as unimaginably large and hot as the night before. Without worrying about judgment, Iruka pushed down on Kakashi’s predatory but generous hand, wanting more than just fingers. He was about to say as much when the jōnin brought his other hand upward, carefully drawing Iruka’s head aside, leaving his marked neck more clearly available to view. 

Then there was a long, wet tongue laving attention on Iruka’s new wound.

He shivered in delight.

Iruka’s shiver became a full shudder when Kakashi suddenly lifted him upward, adjusting his hips, and then –

He’d really been expecting to get fucked, but no –

Kakashi bent him over, putting Iruka’s shoulders and upper back on the bed, the scarred midsection of his back caught in a full curve, his hips and legs up, as –

The alpha’s tongue thrust deep inside him!

Fuck, Iruka remembered this part, too! Because yet again he was making this crazy unthinking whine, he couldn’t stop the sound, he didn’t even try this time. But it seemed to only intensify Kakashi’s actions and interest in his new favorite activity. The alpha held him even tighter in this almost-humiliating new position. With his ass was fixed high up in the air, Iruka’s legs desperately tried to find purchase on some part, any part of Kakashi’s pajama-clad body. 

A hot breath spread against his most intimate space as Kakashi paused for a second and then confessed hoarsely, “I’ve always wanted to do this to you.”

Iruka’s legs seemed to act of their own accord: he clenched down on Kakashi’s back, forcing the man forward, and Kakashi obeyed instantaneously without any protest. The alpha was indecent in opening Iruka up even further. Certainly he could tell that Iruka was still soft from a few hours prior, but he only seemed interested in satiating his desire to learn every part of Iruka, all the places he’d ever fantasized about.

It might have been embarrassing that he hadn’t noticed Kakashi’s crush when the alpha had felt such fondness for him for so long, but Iruka could privately admit to himself as he moaned and his toes curled –

He had jerked off several times to the idea of finally beating Kakashi in a spar and then fucking him ruthlessly on the training field, making the man come over and over again and having him _just begging_ for more.

So no fucking judgment here! Not when this was so damn good, and Kakashi was obviously satisfied with his long-awaited prize, but, admittedly, Iruka did want…

“Kakashi,” he heard himself say in a surprisingly intense, scolding tone. “I said to fuck me.” 

Somehow, with jōnin-level skill and grace, Kakashi kept Iruka aloft and removed both his shirt and pants at the same time. He was remorseless in his efficiency, as always, but now there was an undeniable and palpable sexual edge to everything. Apparently just as eager to fulfill the promise as to hear Iruka say it, Kakashi was soon pressed against him, his impressive length hot and intent against Iruka’s entrance. The alpha’s hands were perfect in their strength and calm, yet when Iruka looked up towards his revealed expression, he saw that Kakashi was fully flushed, appearing as if he was in heat once again.

He wasn’t in heat… he was just aroused like crazy. He just really, really wanted Iruka.

It nearly stopped Iruka’s heart when he and Kakashi made eye contact again. Their long impassioned stares were something else – he was never going to get used to them – he was going to fade away into the spirit realm and wander other dimensions with his chakra burning – 

Kakashi made it so much worse by suddenly declaring:

“I want you to tie me up and fuck me.”

Before Iruka could even fathom how to respond, Kakashi submitted to the earlier order – and thrust into Iruka with deliberate but still violent force – _going in deep_ \- he was holding Iruka’s ankles, thighs, knees decisively and interchangeably, keeping a solid grip on him – Kakashi’s silver pubic hair and thick cock on full display as they fucked hard and uninterrupted - Iruka’s brutalized thighs exposed, flinching, flexing with every domineering brutal motion – 

It was a crazy position – a wild unexpected position – Iruka’s feet were nearly over his head, his whole body lifted up and held almost straight, his ass in the air – Kakashi driving into him while basically standing on the bed – it was strange realizing Iruka’s scarred back wasn’t the alpha’s obsession this time – but instead – but still -

Kakashi was so obviously memorizing Iruka’s reaction with his Sharingan, Iruka couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, half-moaning, half-laughing, “You are an absolute pervert!”

“Speak for yourself, Iruka-sensei,” Kakashi replied in a ridiculous sing-song voice as he reached down and gave Iruka an incredibly perfect stroke from his balls to the tip of his cock, squeezing out precum and making Iruka convulse and nearly lose his fucking mind. “You’re making such a face – and, with the Sharingan, I could actually show you what you look like.” 

Iruka’s hand curved over Kakashi’s stroking his cock, surprising the alpha, whose rhythm momentarily faltered. Iruka was unrepentant in his torturously suggestive gaze up at the jōnin. Even as he was being mercilessly fucked into the mattress, he gathered the strength to promise Kakashi, spacing out every word, meaning every one of them, “You won’t need your Sharingan when I fuck you: I’m going to make you cry, Kakashi. You’re going to beg me to let you come.”

Kakashi’s rhythm certainly did falter then – because –

Oh, damn, the alpha had - !

Iruka was not expecting the rush of wet warmth within him, nor the amazed flush that sped across his entire body as he realized his promise had tripped Kakashi over into bliss. 

He was still bewildered and raging hard when Kakashi bowed over him just slightly and tried desperately to catch his breath. As he started to pull his hand from his own arousal, Kakashi instead replaced both of their hands, dropping Iruka to the bed, and going right for what his shadow clone had favored with such joy the night before. The jōnin’s skill was also feverishly flawless in this field: he continually buried his nose in Iruka’s dark pubic hair while finger-fucking him at the same time and grabbing an ardent handful of Iruka’s ass. The sight of Kakashi’s bobbing silver hair, the feel of his strong tongue, the doubtlessly memorized way that the alpha found Iruka’s spot over and over again after having now learned it – it was all too much on top of everything –

The fucking crazy alpha jōnin gulped down every last drop of Iruka’s cum, blatantly loving it.

They were both still desperate and delirious as they laid together in bed, reeling from sex. 

At some point, they reached for each other’s hands at the same time – and laughed together, exhausted and bruised and thrilled with so many different future possibilities.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of my labor, posted on Labor Day.
> 
> Thank you for accompanying me on this wild ride. You're as dear and perfect as this pairing. 
> 
> As always, I appreciate your kudos and comments, as well as your readership. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy.
> 
> ___

He could smell blood, smoke, and fear. See terror swamp the nin’s face. Watch electricity cover his hand, flood the atmosphere, slide through her chest. Feel her body stiffen, seize, then drop limp. Then - put her body in a scroll. Return alone to Konoha. Head to the Hokage. Report to the Fifth about the mission’s success. Hand off the corpse. Update his personnel file. 

“What did you say, brat?” 

Kakashi looked lazily down at the Hokage’s desk and gave a single shrug. 

“I have a mate now: Iruka Umino. Add it to my record.”

Kakashi’s words appeared to sow great confusion through the room, drowning the space in silence. The tiger-faced ANBU holding the corpse scroll stopped midway through his vanishing jutsu. Surprise contorted the features of the two women; Tsunade and Shizune seemed struck low by sheer disbelief. 

Unexpectedly, the ANBU spoke out of turn. His mask went askew as he warned, staring intently at Kakashi from only a few feet away: “Iruka-sensei is only a beta. You’re going to hurt him.”

Staying still, Kakashi shifted his single-eyed gaze to Tiger. An alpha, quite young, perhaps one of Iruka’s first students. Specialty ninjutsu, fire-type. Could summon blizzards of fire and ash. Long black hair tied up in braids, silver pins holding it together. Broke his left leg in the last year, still habitually leaning to the right side. No mate. Heat in the next week. Already feeling the itch.

Kakashi didn’t move as he replied, short, pointblank, “Don’t underestimate him.”

Tiger went motionless: he clearly understood he’d been needlessly protecting his old teacher. He ducked his head, embarrassed, and disappeared with the corpse of the missing nin in tow.

Tsunade didn’t even bother dealing with the alpha-on-alpha confrontation. She instead made an interested humming sound in her throat and gestured for Shizune to find Kakashi’s file. It took a moment, during which no one worried with nonsensical small-talk, before Shizune finally returned with paperwork and stamp, studying Kakashi with considerably more captivation than usual. 

“Alright, brat,” the Fifth Hokage declared as she wrote out Iruka’s full name on the document, “I’ll put it in your record temporarily. We’ll get Iruka-sensei to confirm, then it’ll become permanent.” She paused, throwing him an admittedly unsettling glare, and then ordered sharply, “Just be careful. He’s valuable to the village.” Turning to look out the window, she sighed and concluded, “Plus, Naruto will go crazy if his sensei gets hurt.”

“I’d rather die than give Iruka a papercut.”

Shizune went pale at that, her dark eyes wide, while Tsunade looked back at him in open astonishment. But Kakashi remained as he had been, perfectly still and serene. After a long moment of nothing new happening, he gave a two-fingered salute to his Hokage and her assistant and flickered outside.

No one stopped him from leaving, so he walked through Konoha in search of his mate.

He felt different walking around the village. Icha Icha Paradise had prepared him for this. When an alpha found his or her mate, he or she would see the world anew. Colors were brighter, the sun glowed joyfully, the stars shone even in the daytime. Jealousy was a terrible bittersweet thing, but now Kakashi could act on it, defending his precious person in public. He no longer had to endure his heart breaking every time he saw Iruka on dates; he didn’t have to train until passing out after seeing Iruka flirt with another man. 

Now the village felt less like an ocean of strangers and more like a trail leading to Iruka. 

As had been true since Iruka presented, he could track the man’s smell across Konoha. There were more than a million different scents mingling throughout the village – alpha, beta, omega – male, female, intersex – human, animal – flora, fauna – life, death – so on and so on. He’d just left behind an alpha and beta, the Hokage and her assistant, as well as her ANBU, a four-man unit of one alpha, two beta, and one omega. Like they always did, the elite nin protected their scents with skill and finesse, but, unfortunately for them, Kakashi was the most sensitive shinobi outside the Inuzuka clan, and to him, they smelled as strong as burning smoke.

He walked through the marketplace, mostly staffed by beta, mostly visited by beta. The atmosphere was punctuated by two omega recovering from heats and an alpha only hours away from starting her own. ANBU were also stationed here, ready for any needed intervention and defense of villagers from enemy nin and even other Konoha shinobi. The one crouched invisibly on a nearby roof was the most familiar to him – a former omega subordinate who had gone into his first heat only seconds after meeting Kakashi, his new captain. 

Kakashi saluted the man in such a way he only seemed to be brushing a hand through his hair.

In response, Lilypad’s scent rippled, a standard ANBU-omega sign of recognition. 

However, Kakashi didn’t linger: today he had a purpose. 

Iruka wasn’t moving from his location, but Kakashi found he could never perfectly predict the other man’s movements, especially not when pre-genin and former students were involved. When Naruto was in town, Iruka could barely be trailed at all: he hopped between ramen booths, Naruto’s apartment, his apartment, the training fields, the Hokage Monument, every possible place and every improbable place, too. There was no graceful way to hang around the pair without it becoming painfully obvious that Kakashi was interested in the teacher, so he tended to fall back and live his life in utter boredom. He also didn’t want to interrupt Naruto and Iruka’s time together: the two had a profoundly impressive bond, and Kakashi would only get in the way, he was sure of it.

Fortunately, Iruka was not running around town this time. Instead, he was standing with two particularly familiar friends and seemed flustered with their line of questioning. 

Acting on instinct, Kakashi didn’t immediately greet the other man. Instead, he flitted up to the rooftops and neared the three shinobi, using ANBU techniques to stay silent and unseen. 

His overly cautious approach won him truly fascinating intel.

Iruka was joined by two other chūnin beta, Kotetsu and Izumo, a perpetually-united pair. Since the sensei wore his usual gear and hairstyle, he’d left Kakashi’s bite mark readily available to view, something that had not gone unnoticed by the other two shinobi, who were very interested indeed. 

“… alpha/omega play?” Kotetsu was inquiring a bit too loudly by a booth selling wicker baskets. He was looking at the back of Iruka’s neck appreciatively, his dark eyebrows raised high. “I didn’t think you were into that sort of thing! Did you moan, ‘Fill me up, alpha?’ or ‘Only you, alpha!’ I mean, they’re practically the same thing, but what did you end up choosing, Iruka? What did you say?”

Although his skin was a pretty dark hue, Iruka was burning red under his friends’ scrutiny. For a second there, Kakashi thought Izumo was going to step in and rescue Iruka, but instead…

“Don’t tell me it was an actual alpha.”

Well… that was hard to hear. 

At the comment, Iruka’s mortification at the interrogation suddenly evaporated. He looked seriously and furiously at Izumo, who was watching him in turn quite closely, rather concerned. 

“It _was_ an alpha,” Iruka confirmed in a brisk, frosty tone. “Don’t give me that look. He didn’t force me. He was a perfect gentleman.”

Ah… that was not true. Through the confusing haze of his head injury and his unusual heat, Kakashi could spottily recall many individual moments where he’d been nearly violent with Iruka, forcefully taking what he wanted from the other man. He was still having a hard time separating fantasy from reality, but, fortunately, he’d realized a key defining feature to help him differentiate truth from fiction.

Dream-Iruka tended to have soft dark doe eyes.

In reality…. actual-Iruka’s were more molten heat. 

Visibly thrown by Iruka’s declaration, Kotetsu was blinking rapidly, completely caught off-guard. Meanwhile Izumo crossed his arms over his chest and stared right back at Iruka without changing his expression. The three beta chūnin were quiet for a while - until eventually Kotetsu managed to gather himself back together. With an impressed expression and cheeky grin, the man snagged Iruka by the shoulders and pulled him into a sideways embrace.

“Good for you, Iruka!” he declared before turning licentious, his grin going wider. “Did you enjoy yourself? Did it hurt any?” As if suddenly hearing his own words, Kotetsu’s mood dropped precipitously. “He wasn’t in heat, was he?” When Iruka didn’t immediately reply, both Izumo and Kotetsu alike started forward and visually examined their friend for any obvious wounds. 

Izumo seemed much chillier on the subject than Kotetsu. His first question froze Kakashi solid.

“Did you report him? Alphas aren’t allowed to take whoever they please. You know we’re not built to handle them… They’re worse when they’re in heat.”

The way the chūnin spoke betrayed a past trauma with a rampaging alpha, something not lost on either Kotetsu or Iruka, who both looked at him with softer and more sympathetic eyes. 

But Iruka wasn’t relinquishing Kakashi to the angry mob: he gently touched Izumo’s arm and smiled at him, trying to alleviate his worries. “My alpha was good to me. It wasn’t a one-time thing.” He tried to ignore the way the two other men startled and gaped at him in shock. “We’re dating,” Iruka added simply, then pulled back his hand and self-consciously laughed a little. “I’d say we’re mates, actually. I’m not going to see anyone except him. He seems very devoted, too.”

There was unspoiled unending silence in their corner of the marketplace. The tension was so thick that Kakashi almost suffocated on it while on the adjacent rooftop; he could literally feel wool being shoved down his throat and puffing up in his lungs as full-grown sheep. Neither Kotetsu or Izumo seemed to have any idea on how to respond – but Iruka just stood there and waited for their response, looking amazingly patient and only a tad bit awkward.

Kakashi decided to assist: he jumped down by the booth and waved amiably at the three.

“Yo, Iruka-sensei, Hagane-san, Kamizuki-san.”

Two of the chūnin turned to stare at him, unable to absorb even more strangeness.

Yet Iruka Umino was as wonderful as he ever was. He broke into an elated smile and walked straight towards Kakashi without the least bit of nervousness. Looking up at Kakashi with unconcealed fondness, Iruka welcomed him, his dark eyes beautiful and aglow, “I was wondering if you would be back today. It’s great to see you again, Kakashi-sensei.”

Thankfully Kakashi had years of practice keeping his cool around the other man - so he did _not_ melt into a puddle in front of Iruka.

He nodded back, smiling just slightly under his mask. 

After a breathtaking moment where they just gazed and gazed and gazed at each other as if they were the only two people left in the whole wide world, Kakashi forced himself to ask, also making sure his voice stayed even and calm, “Can I walk you home?” 

“Of course,” Iruka answered, his own voice notably breathy. It was too damn thrilling: Kakashi fought his Icha Icha instincts of sweeping Iruka into a passionate embrace and kissing him in front of everyone until they both saw stars. In contrast, he gave the rather stunned-looking Izumo and Kotetsu an informal nod and turned on his heel, heading to Iruka’s apartment. 

The other man stayed at Kakashi’s side, saying nothing to his two companions. It honestly seemed like Iruka might have forgotten his friends existed. When Kakashi glanced at him, curious to see what the teacher’s expression might be, he was surprised to see Iruka fully blushing and working overtime to hide an excited smile. After a moment, Kakashi realized he was also a little flushed; he’d mistaken it for post-mission nerves, but, ah, no… this was romance, wasn’t it?

Still resting his hands in his pockets, Kakashi held his head higher, shifted his shoulders back. So this is what a strutting peacock felt like! It made much more sense why Gai was constantly floating about the village: the man was proud of his partner! Gai was in love.

Kakashi realized that they'd made it to Iruka’s apartment the very same second it occurred to him –

Oh, wait. 

This is love.

Iruka let him inside, and Kakashi obediently went first, still bewildered by the new insight. While he’d understood most of his interest as love-based and not lust-filled… 

Kakashi found himself staring directly at Iruka, unable to move out of the genkan, not reaching down to take off his shoes. 

Did that mean… did Iruka also…?

There was a little odd half-memory of Iruka clutching onto Kakashi’s jacket, breathing roughly into the thick of his hair, uttering something, murmuring the word _love_ … Horribly, though, Kakashi’s hormones ran through him dark and deadly. Even when he tried to concentrate on the fleeting image, Kakashi only could pick out Iruka’s fine scent, the feel of his hot body pressed close, the single desperately wanton word _**love**_.

Absolutely out of nowhere, Iruka was there, in front of him, giving him almost the same look.

In response, Kakashi flushed, naturally stepping backward, but he hit the wall of the entryway. Unabashed and unreasonably assertive, Iruka followed him, putting their bodies together as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Every possible thought in Kakashi’s mind vanished into thin air: he stared single-eyed at the other man, his face instinctively falling blank, although he knew he couldn’t shake the blush pinkening the skin over his mask line. 

“How much of that did you hear?” Iruka asked in a low voice. While he sounded worried, he was simultaneously pulling at Kakashi’s flak jacket with seemingly carefree confidence. 

It didn’t suit him to lie, so Kakashi said simply, “From Hagane talking about roleplaying.”

He was staring down at Iruka’s hand unzipping his flak jacket. Kakashi had about fifty different fantasies where this exact thing happened: instantly, his brain cheerfully flew through them, showing everything from Iruka shoving aside the jacket, lifting up Kakashi’s shirt, and biting his chest while Kakashi squirmed to Iruka stopping himself and demanding huskily, ‘No, leave it on. Fuck me like we’re on a mission.’ Sorrowfully, it was hard to keep track of the present situation with so many delightful things dancing about his head, but then Iruka reintroduced reality. 

“Are you sure you’re fine with me? I _am_ just a beta…”

Kakashi switched positions with Iruka without thinking. He only understood what he’d done when he heard the other man gasp after having been knocked against the wall, but Kakashi was already correcting the terrible injustice happening in front of him without apologizing first.

“You’re not ‘just’ anything. You’re everything. I’ve always wanted you. Only you.”

He should have been patient – or waited for Iruka’s response – but Kakashi felt his head swim, his heart throb, his muscles demand action. Scratching his face from tearing down his mask so fast, he kissed the teacher terrifically hard, pressing inside when Iruka accidentally parted his lips in surprise. He could tell Iruka was still desperately trying to take off his jacket, so he flung it aside, ripping at Iruka’s in turn until he threw it off too. 

Unpredictable heat roared through him, motivated his every motion: Kakashi couldn’t think clearly, but he didn’t want to, not a bit, not at all, he wanted to get lost in this, in Iruka, and so he did, he absolutely did.

There was this glorious sound filling in the entryway – it was Iruka, it was this mind-altering arousing sound he made when he was overcome by excitement – it was making Kakashi see nothing but the other man, hear nothing but him, smell nothing but him, feel nothing but him.

He found his fingers pushing across Iruka’s tongue, kneading into the wetness, while he dragged down Iruka’s collar and leaned into the curve of Iruka’s lovely brown neck, kissing at the dark crescent bruise there.

Iruka’s hands clutched at Kakashi’s hips, keeping them close together; he was grinding against Kakashi’s cock, he was willfully choking on Kakashi’s fingers, he was moaning Kakashi’s first name when they separated for a second and yanked down their clothes just enough, just enough.

Then he bit down on Iruka’s earlobe while pushing three fingers inside the other man down between his thighs. Kakashi was saying in pure sinister satisfaction, “I wouldn’t care if you were an alpha - _I want you._ I want to lick you open. I want to hear you cry out my name.”

At the same time, Iruka was clawing up Kakashi’s shirt, revealing his back, leaving long red stripes of wondrous agony. The other man couldn’t catch his breath – something Kakashi seemed to remember happening before when once again hearing those gasps and pants in the throes of passion – and it only encouraged Kakashi’s escalating intensity, so he replaced his fingers with his cock without warning.

Even with his pants hanging crazily from one leg, Iruka managed to wrap himself around Kakashi’s waist, while he was held high off the ground and shoved hard against the wall. He was gorgeously clinging to Kakashi’s shoulders, making those gasps, those desperate panting sounds, every one of them making Kakashi’s cock harder and urging him to fuck Iruka deeper.

In some astral-distant way, he knew he was out of control, particularly _because_ he was an alpha, but it was hard, no, impossible to pull back, to restrain himself from fucking Iruka against the apartment wall and sucking a brand new red-black bruise on the man’s neck. 

He caught a hold of himself when he heard Iruka make a high-pitched throaty sound – he wasn’t sure what that was – what that meant – was he hurting - ?

“I love you, I love you so much,” Iruka hissed in confession into Kakashi’s right ear, and then the delirious victorious chūnin-sensei came so hard that sex suddenly saturated Kakashi’s senses –

He was barely able to thrust into the other man once more before the violent white pleasure soaking his worldview exploded into a billion twinkling stars of light – sunlight – daylight – moonlight – lightning – electricity crackling – a crazy midnight storm overtaking his everything –

They were sprawled in the genkan with Iruka draped over him, both of them fighting to breathe properly. After who-knows-how-many-minutes, Kakashi managed to open his one eye to consider their surroundings. He realized after a very long delay that they’d just had sex with their hitai-ates, shirts, and sandals on… just like their first time in the classroom. 

Protectively putting one arm around Iruka, whose eyes were closed and arms were already wrapped around Kakashi’s waist, he tried to memorize the reality of this time. Kakashi meticulously put it ahead of all the fantasies; he organized its placement beside their sex yesterday morning when they’d been together in Iruka’s bedroom. Yet again, he recognized the flaws in his imagination. There hadn’t been enough passionate declarations of love.

He blinked, realizing he hadn’t – 

“Have I ever said I love you?” Kakashi asked quietly. He was thoroughly humiliated he couldn’t remember; it reminded him of all his failures as a nin, a jōnin, an alpha, a man. Shinobi instinct and life experience battled within him: he ended up loosely sitting up against the wall while also making a mortified expression down at Iruka’s disheveled ponytail and slanted hitai-ate.

Iruka’s lethal black eyes looked up at him.

Unable to stop himself, Kakashi shuddered full-body.

_That gaze_ was something out of fantasy. _That_ was a look of love and desire.

“Is there something else you want to tell me?” Iruka inquired in a tone that very much indicated out-of-his-mind-Kakashi had said something significant and then never mentioned it again.

… His shadow clone. His evil, thieving, first-blowjob-stealing shadow clone.

He could just make out the clone’s memory through the tumult of everything: it had been carefully observing Kakashi from a distance in case it needed to intervene. In the dark Forest of Death, Kakashi had intercepted the ANBU recovery team, crushed them into Sharingan-induced genjutsu, and then left them behind after further binding them to trees. Towards the end of the four-man fight, the shadow clone had apparently decided its creator would win, so it maliciously confessed to Iruka on Kakashi’s behalf that…

“I want you to be my mate,” he whispered, unable to look away from Iruka’s fiery gaze.

Kakashi did not feel remotely like an alpha as Iruka rose between his legs like a languid predator suddenly finding prey. Catching Kakashi’s maskless face in two strong hands, Iruka’s whole expression was aflame with emotion, and his smile was satisfied beyond measure. 

“I keep asking you to make me yours… But, you know what? _You’re mine_ ,” Iruka declared triumphantly, sounding totally pleasure-drenched. “We’re mates, no matter what anyone else says.” As Iruka leaned in for a kiss, he paused right before their lips met and said so very tenderly, “I’m never letting you go.”

That was more than fine with Kakashi… because now that he finally had his person, Kakashi couldn’t imagine life without Iruka Umino… his utterly perfect mate.


End file.
